I had the idea for this project at the start of 2023 while quarantined with COVID-19.  I stumbled upon a lot of old student clickers as part of an online auction and thought it would be cool to try repurposing them.  I had just finished TeeEye and knew that it should be possible to make some interesting text-based visuals or perhaps tell a bifurcating story with them. 

With this knowledge in mind, I placed my $8 bid and was soon the winner and recipient of around 150 student clickers! Although with shipping it ended up being closer to $80. That was still only about $0.50 per module!  

The student clickers were ActivExpression 2 from the company Promethean.  They have a backlit LCD screen and a full QWERTY keyboard. 

Once the clickers arrived I took one apart and was relieved to see that it would be possible to directly access the keypad elements by soldering jumper wires onto the pads.

Everything seemed like it was going to go smoothly until I powered one up and realized that the devices needed to be unlocked for them to enter typing mode.  This started a very long process of trying to unlock the clickers.