Design and development of a portable attendance / response-ware system (WANET - Fireflies)

Abstract

Audience engagement is an important part of an event as it increases the interaction with the participants and can be increased using a response-ware system, such as Slido. One common use of response-ware is for the question and answer (Q&A) session in an event where audience can submit their questions to be addressed by the presenter. This project aims to design and develop a portable response-ware system (called Fireflies). Portable means that this system should be scalable to cover a range of areas, fault-tolerant, and not rely on external infrastructure such as connection to internet and power supply.

The proposed system, Fireflies, will be created using multiple Raspberry Pi (RPi) each with its own power bank and external network adapter. These RPi will act as a node and create a WANET using batman-adv routing protocol to communicate with each other. Each RPi will act as an access point where the audience can connect to it and access the Fireflies response-ware web application. Fireflies will use Delta-CRDT concept to store data in-memory and synchronize data across all RPi nodes. Elixir programming language with Phoenix framework and its LiveView feature is chosen for the web application development. As a result, a response-ware system consisting of three nodes managed to work as intended.