GuruBlog

nine years ago I build the first version of my wtf-counter - a huge emergency button connected to an arduino and a linux box that later got replaced with a raspberry pi. The button can be hit whenever a WTF! situation is happening in the office and the current count is displayed on a monitor. The installation is still in place and used quite a lot - but since I'm currently working at a customers site, I've build a second version. But since the toolstack I used for v1 is a bit dated by todays standards I decided to modernize it a bit.

The new version of the WTF-Counter uses a raspberry pi zero and the emergency button is directly connected to one of the gpio pins of the raspberry using only a resitor and a ts-jack. The pi writes an entry to a log file whenever the button is hit and uses a small monitor to display the current count using a small pygame programm. I didn't install an X-Server but draw the graphics directly on the framebuffer of my pi.