Pi Loves the Nightlife

Many young couples contemplating starting a family wonder how much having children will affect their lives. Will they be able to, for example, continue enjoying the nightlife that they are accustomed to. In a word — no. As a parent you will never again be cool or enjoy a night out on the town. Proceed directly to mom jeans, fanny packs, and dad jokes without passing Go.

Well, that is not entirely true. Once or twice a year an opportunity might arise to throw off the fanny pack, hit the clubs, and sing along to “Glory Days.” This is the situation Ashwin Mathews found himself in a few years ago after he and his wife welcomed their first child into the world. So when those rare opportunities to get down and boogie came along, the last thing he wanted to do was waste them. But being completely disconnected from the club scene for so long left him picking duds more often than not.

These experiences led Mathews to wonder why there were no tools comparable to restaurant review sites for night clubs. With such a tool, a quick check would let him know if the vibe was what he was looking for before he wasted the night finding out firsthand. Clearly there was an unmet need in this area, so Mathews set out to fill it by designing a system called Vibechek.

Different people look for different things when deciding where to go. In Mathews’ case, music is king. If a night spot typically plays music he likes, then that is where he wants to be. So the first thing that was needed was data. The simplest way to collect it would be with a crowdsourcing smartphone app, where club goers let everyone else know what kind of music is being played at a given venue. But when an app like this is new, it has no information available and it is very hard to build up a user base.

So Mathews took a more active approach by working with club owners. He supplied them with a simple device consisting of a Raspberry Pi computer, USB microphone, and a USB modem with a SIM card to wirelessly transmit the data it collects to remote systems. Using an open-source library, the device identifies the music that is playing at the location, then sends that information to a centralized data store such that it can be searched via a website or app. The components were fitted into a custom, 3D-printed case to give the device a professional appearance.

While Vibechek is a very interesting idea, it has not been received well by the clubs that Mathews approached. In general, managers were not incentivized to adopt the device to drive traffic because they already had lines of people waiting to get in every night, or they did not want a microphone listening in all the time. The technological solution is quite clever, but as us hardware hackers know all too well, that is not always the key to commercial success. Looks like it's back to the drawing board for now!