TV

A plasma screen is affixed to the wall. It displays status information about the space.

The Screen

It's a Hitachi 42PD5000. Native resolution is 1024x1024, but it does not accept digital input at this resolution, or any sane resolution. The screen itself is 16:9, but all the advertised EDID modes are 4:3. The manual suggests that it should be capable of more, but these are specific to which inputs are used (DVI accepts different resolutions to VGA).

After much experimentation, I (HEx) settled on 1024x768 over VGA, software scaled to 1366x768.

Sauron

Driving the screen is an Athlon 64 box named sauron (172.31.26.112). It runs debian jessie.

User "kiosk" is logged in on boot, running Chromium in kiosk mode.

Status page

The status page displays:

• General status from the API (open or closed, who's here, current temperature).
• Twitter feed
• Mailing list feed
• IRC
• Camera feed

The code is stored on GitHub and is checked out locally to /srv/lhs-status on Sauron, which is then served by Apache.

Mailing list feed

The list of topics on the mailing list is served as an RSS feed by Google Groups, but due to CORS restrictions it cannot be accessed using an AJAX request directly from the status page. As a workaround, Apache is configured to reverse-proxy requests to topics.xml in the main lhs-status directory to the actual Google Groups RSS URL.

IRC client

Commands

The IRC client has some commands that can be run from the IRC channel. They can be triggered by mentioning the name of the bot in the Leeds Hackspace channel, followed by the command name, then the command arguments. Example: "Sauron-tv: bigtext This message will appear big onscreen". They don't work by private messaging Sauron-tv.

Currently available commands are:

• bigtext - show a short message in big flashing text on screen for 10 seconds. Args: the string to show

Implementation

The IRC client embedded within the status page is a fork of the Shout Node JS-based web IRC client. The fork includes Hackspace-specific additions such as a theme that hides all UI elements apart from the main chat messages window, in addition to having several pull requests on the main Shout repository merged (automatically joining the channel on load, and adding a framework for client plugins).

The client runs as a node process (managed by supervisord), which listens for HTTP connections on port 3000. The status page then embeds the client in an iframe pointing at http://localhost:3000.