Each year Girton College throws a big party called the spring ball. This is an event organised by the students
and I wanted to help so I signed up with a friend of mine to do the IT (website, email etc..) and the ticketing.
We looked at all the different ticketing solutions on the market: we looked at Fixr and other similar solutions,
but they were all quite expensive, especially as we had over 1000 guests arriving, so even a small percentage
quickly became a lot of money. To save cost and because we wanted the challenge, we decided to build our own
ticketing system.
The first step was to generate a unique QR code for each attendee, and then generate a ticket with their name and
ticket type and finally send it to them. I did this using Python and I was pretty nervous about pressing go on my
script to send out so many emails, but it all worked out flawlessly.
I then bought some Raspberry Pis, touchscreens and QR code scanners. The idea was that each Raspberry Pi would access a central SQL database and strike off guests who had entered and allow the checker to make sure their ID matched their name. The video shows the system in action. This was my first time coding something that had to work, if not we were going to have over 1000 angry guests waiting for a long time, so I tested the system thoroughly and it worked the whole night, got the guests in quickly and saved the guests some money!