If you've read the Galleryzone PDF from 25.8. and the other diary entries from today, you'll miss one special device in the Galleryzone: The queue controller. This device is the very last station in the course. The Gallerydrive car will stop there, and a friendly service staff member will help the visitor out of the car. Then, the service staff member will push a button at the queue controller and the car starts to queue in a row of cars, which all wait for driving another visitor.

On the picture below, you can see the basic parts of this queue controller:

The device is based on an ATmega 8. I wanted to build a queue controller with some additional features, so this also has a piezo speaker and a bidirectional IR communication (the IR receiver and transmitter are located left to the red LED).

As you can see, this controlleer gets its own power supply. The height of the controller case matches the height of the IR transceiver of the Gallerydrive car.

This is the user interface for the service staff. For the basic functionality, it would only need the button. But I decided to attach a display as well.

When a car enters, it transmits its own car number, the minimum battery voltage during the last course and the actual battery voltage. Those values are directly displayed on the LCD screen, so the service staff knows, when the batteries have to be charged or changed.

In my small setup, the device worked well. The wheelchair stops at the according RFID-tag. It transmits the values and when the button is pushed, it goes on with driving.

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