The Scottosphere

Just got back from Danger!Awesome, where I got to burn some wed­ding para­pher­na­lia with laser beams! It’s fan­tas­tic to live in a city with a walk-in laser-cutting shop. And the guys who run it (a few MIT alums, nat­u­rally) are pretty rad.

The par­tic­u­lar machine I was using had pre­vi­ously been used to burn 2,000 pieces of toast for a stop-motion OK Go music video. My project is not nearly so ambi­tious (or edible).

A spir­ited elec­tion sea­son such as this one called for a spir­ited party. And what bet­ter to build for a post-election party than a full-scale vot­ing booth that takes your pic­ture when you vote?

I built this vot­ing booth entirely out of scrap wood. The side pieces of masonite are rein­forced with Dex­ion at the top to with­stand emphatic pulling of the cur­tains. A flu­o­res­cent light illu­mi­nates the “vot­ing” area (Sharpie mark­ers pro­vided). The vot­ing han­dle, which looks sus­pi­ciously like an old hockey stick, moves smoothly in a machined plas­tic block. Elas­tic bands in the back (see pic­ture to the right) give the han­dle a bistable spring action. A microswitch detects when the vot­ing han­dle is thrown to the right. The switch input con­nects to a ser­ial port on a FreeBSD machine, where a cus­tom C pro­gram detects the “vote.” Using libgphoto2, the pro­gram remotely con­trols a USB-tethered dig­i­tal SLR mounted over­head. The pic­ture is taken, imme­di­ately trans­ferred back to the com­puter, and deleted from the mem­ory card. The pro­gram drops the image onto a Web site, updat­ing a link so that within sec­onds, an auto-refreshing Web page dis­plays the lat­est pic­ture full-screen on a nearby mon­i­tor.

After the early demise of 2006’s earth­quake dance floor, I wanted to make this one com­pletely inde­struc­table, so I used the most badass limit switch in my parts bin. Unfor­tu­nately there is only so much you can do to with­stand the gen­tle touch of dozens of drunk peo­ple con­fronted with a 12 inch lever. The switch fell apart later in the evening, but amaz­ingly I was able to get it going again with just a cou­ple of bolts and some elec­tri­cal tape.

But enough with the tech­ni­cal details—on to the evening’s pic­tures!