Touch Panels

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Revision as of 14:58, 18 February 2010 by Rubin110 (talk | contribs)
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A bunch of folks worked on getting the touch panels working. Then another bunch of folks wanted to setup some sort of crazy control Noisebridge in case of a fire thing with it, SCADA.

Fast forward a few months, the touch panels really haven't gotten that much use out of them. Currently the boot image for the panel starts up linux, runs Iceweasle full screen and points to a URL on Pony. All that's left is whipping some HTML together to make a neat interface that provides information and control regarding things we currently have in the space.

Requirements

Fundamentals

  • Setup a system where anyone can create apps and content for this system.
  • "Don't suggest it and walk away, implement it instead!"

Back end

  • Apatche! Web apps!
    • Everyone can write web pages!

Functionality

  • You touch the touch panel and it clicks
  • You drag on the touch panel and it moves the mouse
  • When the thing boots it brings up a browser full screen
  • After a time out the browser resets to a "main menu" of sorts
    • Includes current time
  • After a time out the box brings up some sort of interesting screen saver
  • The browser is killed and restarted once every 3 hours to help with getting stuck in a weird state
    • Possibly displaying the current time
  • When navigating away from the main menu, there's a "home bar" at top
    • Link to the menu
    • Title of the current page
    • Current time

Application

  • Open the gate
  • Control X10 lights
  • Simplistic jukebox
    • Currently playing on the main menu
  • Control the mediacenter
  • A "internet browser" interface

Information

  • Local restaurants and menus for each
  • Bus times
  • Bart Times
  • Listing of events at Noisebridge, or the new scheduler
  • Weather
    • With some info on the main menu
  • Watch a hacker space, links to web cams for other spaces

Bugs

  • Scroll bars are going to be tricky
  • Navigating to pages outside of the panel site might lead to the browser getting into a weird state. The dumb fix is to kill and restart the browser session every once in a while (3 hours sounds good).

Jukebox interfaces