“Tags of Fun”

Regular readers of this blog (and yes there are some) may remember back in March when I made “The Door of Mystery”. This was an RFID tag powered raffle management system based on the .NET Gadgeteer. It worked very well when we used it for the Red Nose Day Lecture in Rhyme, and the people who bought tags to take part rather liked having them around, and hung on to them.

Which got me thinking. I’d like to be able to do prize draws and things in lectures, with bigger prizes if you’ve been along to more lectures. And I reckoned that these little tags might be a way to do this.

So I’ve invented “Tags of Fun”. We are going to give all the new students a tag each and I’m going to trial the devices at the Welcome Party on Thursday evening. We usually give “Drink Tokens” out, but this time everyone can use their tag with a customised “Door of Mystery” device to see if they can have a drink. The system will let you buy one drink, and then the head of department will have to use their magic “key of power” to reset the keys and allow more drinking.

Just to make things even more interesting, I’m going to link each tag with an owner, so the system knows the name of the tag holder.

Of course, now I have to get the software updated, download the student lists, build the user interface and program around 250 tags.

Before Thursday.