Something that no one needs are 5 buzzers mounted on a wooden plate.
But if they are wireless, are always on, almost never need a battery change, and can trigger videos or other actions, they’re pretty cool. 
In order not to worry about turning them on and off, we used a system normally built for home light switches by Homematic IP. Since they only use energy when they are pushed, the battery almost lasts forever. The signal is finally converted to OSC messages arriving in Gig Performer. On a global level they then trigger short videos (like in a 90s German TV show) but they can be overridden by local rackspaces to do other things like starting sequences, trigger samples, turn on mics, kill the lights…
The signal flow is like this:
- Buttons connected to
- Homematic Contact Interface sends to
- RaspberryMatic (free OS for home automation on Raspberry Pi) sends http requests to
- Bitfocus Companion running in a container on the same Raspberry Pi send OSC messages over LAN to
- Gig Performer
Sounds long and there definitely is some delay of about 300-500 ms. But it’s a fun effect and for the things mentioned above it works really well!
