Best Physical Buttons and Buzzers for Buzzinga
Last updated on July 30, 2024
One of the best parts of Buzzinga is that players can use their phone or device as a buzzer. Although Buzzinga does its best to handle network issues and latency between players’ devices, sometimes the experience can still be less than ideal when network conditions are not favorable.
Fortunately, another great feature of Buzzinga is its support for physical buttons and buzzers! These can be tabletop buttons or handheld buzzers, wired or wireless. Anything that fires a unique keyboard keypress can be used with Buzzinga.
The best part of using physical buttons and buzzers for in-person games is that the issues with latency and network conditions are almost entirely eliminated.
While you can create your own buzzers with an Arduino and some ingenuity, not everyone is technically savvy or has the time to figure it out. If you don’t, here is the best off-the-shelf solution we could find in terms of reliability, ease of use, and price.
Wireless tabletop buzzers from AffordableBuzzers.com.
Buzzinga has no affiliation with Affordable Buzzers, but we found them incredibly easy to set up and use. Since they’re wireless, they don’t get in the way. They each take (and come with) 3 AAA batteries. A small USB adapter plugs into the host’s computer or laptop running Buzzinga, and voilà, it detects key presses from the buzzers. Then, on Buzzinga, the host can navigate to the Buttons & Buzzers page to set up the teams with their own team name, buzzer color, and the key that buzzer is mapped to.
Based on the example above, when Team 1 hits their red buzzer, it sends a keypress of 1 to the host’s computer via the USB adapter and Buzzinga now knows that Team 1 buzzed in.
When you order them, just add a note specifying which button you want mapped to which keys. Since Buzzinga uses letter-based keyboard keys to help the host navigate the board, we suggest picking a unique number key for each buzzer. For example: Red = 1, Blue = 2, Green = 3, etc.
We hope this helps, and please reach out if you have any other suggestions, questions or feedback!