Brian Jepson used the XBee Internet Gateway running on a Digi ConnectPort to create a distributed voting system to compile feedback from a wine tasting event at O’Reilly Media’s Strata big data conference in Santa Clara, California. The WineShade manages all the data acquisition and display for Coco Krumme‘s Data Crush: Where Wine and Data Meet.
“This new event at Strata hosted wine tastings for participants, whose feedback data was compiled and analyzed to extrapolate behavioral trends and factors influencing their responses. At the event, we had several stations set up with different types of wine. It was your basic taste test, where the brands were concealed, and the architect of the experiment (Coco) used various methods to influence responses. After the participants drank the wine, they were instructed to proceed to the WineShade voting station and press the button whose label corresponded to the wine they just drank. As the experiment proceeded, the votes were tallied on a central server.”
Because the voting stations were distributed throughout the event, each station needed a way to talk to a central server. Brian used Digi’s XBee modules, and the XBee Internet Gateway (XIG) on a ConnectPort X2, to move data from the XBee network directly to his web servers. (The XIG can also talk to the iDigi cloud directly.)
You can read the full project description on the MAKE Magazine blog.
