[plug] Display control

[Tim Bowden]

On Mon, 2014-12-22 at 18:52 +0800, Kevin Shackleton wrote:
> Hi everyone, hope you're all shaping up for a great Christmas, break
> or no break.
> 
> 
> Here's a fairly abstract problem.  I would demonstrate a solution on
> e.g. a Raspberry Pi, and transition to some tougher industrial PC.  It
> could be described as a "business situational awareness display"
> 
> 
> This PC is to be set up in a central area of a business, driving a
> fairly good display.  It will share a folder (or tree if you like).
> 
> 
> Other PCs can feed various files onto this central display PC's shared
> folders.  The PC then draws these appropriately, switching from
> single-pane to 2-pane, 4 pane, maybe 6 or 8 pane to accommodate
> displaying the data.  The contributor PCs would delete the data to
> cancel their display.
> 
> 
> In the simplest form, the data would be images (screen shots maybe).
> More sophistication could include:
> 
>  - some consistency in which pane each contributor is displayed.
> 
>  - maybe a rolling sequence could be used instead of, or as well as,
> multiple panes.
> 
>  - handling other file formats including Office formats.
> 
>  - labelling each panel with some text identifying the source.
> 
>  - probably lots of other things I have not thought about
> 
> 
> I don't really want to get into the capabilities of X, because the
> contributors will be dumb to X (i.e. Windows)
> 
> 
> This sounds as though it's been done before.  Any clues as to ways to
> go about it?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Kevin.

I take it the 'central display PC' will be non-interactive (ie, no
keyboard or mouse)?  Can't you just set it up to display a web page that
gets updates with a bit of javascript?  Central web server somewhere
else holds the 'folders' and generates the content based on that to be
served on the next poll by the web page.

Regards,
Tim Bowden