Repurpose A Classroom Clicker For Great Justice

December 4, 2016 by Elliot Williams 42 Comments

If you’ve been in a university class of a certain size, with a professor who wants to get live feedback from the students, you’ve probably been forced to buy a Turning Point “clicker”. Aside from the ridiculousness of making students pay for their professor’s instructional aides (do the make you pay extra for the chalk too?!?!) these clickers are a gauntlet thrown down to any right-minded hacker because they supposedly contain secrets.

[Nick] had one of these gadgets, and hopped right up on the shoulders of giants to turn it into a remote control that interfaces with his computer and drives a synthesizer, so he can work through the chord changes by clicking. His two references, to [Travis Goodspeed]’s nRF promiscuity hack and to [Taylor Killian]’s Arduino library for the clickers are a testament to why we need both reverse engineers doing the hard work and people who’ll wrap up the hard work in an easy-to-use library.

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Emulating A Student Clicker With An Arduino

November 16, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 20 Comments

When schools and universities have hundreds of students in a lecture course, they need a way to tell alumni and other potential benefactors that faculty/student relations are just as good as they were in the 1960s, when enrollment was just a fraction of current levels. Technology solves all problems, apparently, so administrators of these universities turn to ‘clickers’ – radio frequency remotes used to take attendance and administer quizzes.These clickers have absolutely no security, so it’s no surprise [Taylor Killian] was able to emulate one of these clickers with an Arduino allowing anyone with a laptop to cheat on a quiz, or have an entire class show up with only one student in the room.

Previously [Travis Goodspeed] (thanks for sending this in, [Travis]) tore apart one of these clickers – a TurningPoint ResponseCard RF – and discovered it uses a Nordic nRF24L01 wireless transceiver, commonly available on eBay for about two dollars.

[Taylor] connected this wireless module to an Arduino and whipped up a bit of code that allows him to listen to the audience responses, respond to a question as either a single clicker or all clickers, automatically respond with the most popular answer, and even block all audience responses to each question.

Perhaps technology doesn’t solve every problem, but at least [Taylor] learned something from a glorified remote control sold at the bookstore at an insane markup.