Touch Panels

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.

The system that runs the touchpanel laptop (thinkpad) by the door (172.30.0.31) is required for opengate-www and opengate scripts to work. It is connected by parallel port to a relay which is linked into the door buzzer system.

This laptop runs uses PXE boot and an image from a tftp server on Stallion to runTemplate:Verify. It will not boot without network and this server on the remote system.

Currently the boot image for the panel starts up linux, runs Iceweasel full screen and points to a URL on Pony. There's a neat extensible 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

• Apache! 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).

Installed Plugins

• Refresh2
• autohide
• Grab and Drag

Jukebox interfaces

• http://theory.steelbreeze.org/
• http://www.renedegroot.nl/mpd.xml
• http://manatlan.infogami.com/wymypy
• http://sites.google.com/site/cseickel/mpdwebamp
• http://code.google.com/p/fookebox/
• http://cims.nyu.edu/~stucchio/software/djpirate/index.html
• http://sourceforge.net/projects/mmpd/

Build Procedures

The netboot environment is just debian-live. If you don't read the manual you're likely to break something by accident. It's better to do development on your local machine using qemu and a copy of the config tree before executing the procedure below to push it out.

• Log into stallion and make the changes you want to the files in /netboot/config as root.
• cd /netboot/config
• rm -rf binary* cache chroot
• sudo lh_build --force
• Back up the contents of /srv/debian-live
• Test your image, see the manual for how to set up a test environment. It's simpler than you think.
• If everything worked, move /netboot/binary/* and /netboot/tftpboot to /srv/debian-live
• Reboot one of the lesser used netboot machines and do a sanity check, make sure your changes aren't causing the machines to run out of memory and invoke the OOM killer.
• Reboot the rest of the machines if you're happy.
• If nothing breaks after a while, do a hg commit in /netboot/config.