Beg Button on Martin Ellis

Beg Button - Part 3: Adding Walk/Stop Lights

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This is the third post about the EMF beg button. Part 1 covers the original 2024 build, and Part 2 covers this year’s rewrite of the software. This post is about the hardware side: a set of Walk/Stop lights I picked up, and getting them properly mounted in time for EMF.

The Walk/Stop Lights

As mentioned before I aquired a set of Walk/Stop lights at some point in the last couple of years¹. I got the lights home, and found out they had been quite heavily modified to work of a low voltage power supply, but the power supply was pretty old and ran hot, and the effect wasn’t great. I also realised I had no way of mounting it…

Beg Button - Part 2: The Rust Rewrite

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In 2024 I took a beg button, with a screen in it, to EMF as a little installtion for our village, this year with the best laid plans I entended to “make it better”, starting with the software running the whole thing.

The Beg Button at EMF

EMF Camp: Beg Button

Thu, 28 Mar 2024 15:00:59 +0000

EMF Camp¹ time was rolling around again, and this time I was determined to actually bring something to show off… I’ve got my hands on and old pedestrian crossing “beg button”² and thought it an interesting basis for a small installation to take with me

We will get back to the details of the project later in this post, but as a quick spoiler the project was a success.

The finished project at EMF Camp 2024