A Question of Sport

Tak Určite is a Slovak version of a British television sports quiz show called A Question of Sport which is produced and broadcast by the BBC. It is known to be the “world’s longest running TV sports quiz.” (The first edition of A Question of Sport was broadcasted on 5 January 1970.)

In 2020 RTVS brought this format to Slovakia and I was responsible for development of custom solution delivering real-time graphics for this show. Tak Určite required many video outputs, complex game logic, multi-touch input and wireless I/O. Whole system for this show was developed by two people over the course of two months.

Show features 14 unique games - each of them having different rules, logic and graphics. It was also necessary to deliver large amount of I/O - total of 16 video outputs and 7 player button inputs. All of this presented a challenge in terms of optimization and rapid development. Whole show system eventually run on a single workstation.

Wireless I/O

One of the games required portable table with button and LED strip making it a perfect opportunity to build custom Wi-Fi I/O using Arduino. As I haven’t done much soldering before, I was happy to learn from my colleague on how to do basic circuits.
Once input changes, signal from Arduino is send over Wi-Fi to main server where it is processed (SFX, etc.) and based on game logic is signal send back to Arduino (in order to tell it to light up LED strips using relay). Round-trip latency was measured to be around 30ms which is nice.

Shooting Tak Určite was a lot of fun and I hope audience will enjoy it.