Cost-Effective Classroom Control
The
Pro
ject
WHO ARE THESE GUYS?
Heric Flores, Ph.D.
Manager of Instructional Media Services
Robert Christensen
Instructional Media Specialist
Brian Gapinski
Student Programming Manager
Justin Raymond
Student Programmer
INSTRUCTIONAL MEDIA SERVICES
Frontline ITS support for classrooms, labs and special events
120 classrooms, 7 labs and over 1300 events per year
Almost entirely student staffed
Foster an environment of student creativity
Give students professional experience and responsibility
INSTRUCTIONAL MEDIA SERVICES
Management and Training
Classroom Design, Construction and Maintenance
Video Recording & Post-Production
Content Creation (WesPregame)
Student Programming
WHY cmdr?
Vendor supplied solutions prohibitively expensive for many institutions
Vendor solutions often reach obsolescence quickly
Proprietary vendor solutions lead to lock-in; often cumbersome to change to "better" solutions
It's free, open-source and runs on inexpensive commodity hardware!
WHAT IS CMDR?
Open-source touchscreen A/V control system
Designed, built and maintained by Wesleyan students!
Features:
Control over RS-232 and TCP/IP
Friendly DSL for writing device drivers
Supports the PJLink standard
Supports most Extron devices
Has a RESTful API
Runs on commodity hardware
CMDR BACKEND
Written entirely in Ruby
eventmachine for event processing
amqp for message queueing
em-websocket for communication between front/backend
state_machine for internal representation of room state
CMDR FRONTEND
Written in HTML5/CSS and JavaScript
Communicates with backend via websockets
HARDWARE
ASUS EeeBox PC EB1030
Intel Atom D2550
2GB DDR3 RAM
32GB SSD
HARDWARE
Mimo Touch 2 DisplayLink USB Touchscreen
7" - 16:9 - 800x480
SOFTWARE
DEPLOYMENT
Not entirely user friendly ...YET!
Customized Ubuntu Server image
Dependency package deployment via Chef
CouchDB database configuration
Deployment of cmdr daemon and interface
DEPLOYMENT AT WESLEYAN
2009: A single room
2014: 42 total deployments
All rooms by 2016!
Replacement of proprietary vendor solutions has allowed TREMENDOUS budgetary flexibility.
CMDR-SERVER
Still a major work-in-progress
Configures, monitors and controls all clients
Uses zeroconf networking for discovery of clients
Notification system for preventative maintenance
CMDR-SERVER
CMDR-SERVER
UI REDESIGN DEMO
Please harshly criticize Justin's design.
THE FUTURE IS NOW
Short-term:
Finalize and deploy UI redesign
Create easy-to-install package for releases
Autoconfigure of endpoints and devices via cmdr-server
Optimize for Raspberry Pi
Long-term:
Transition to 100% IP control via cmdr-server
"Watchman" project - Automated classroom checking
Develop Android frontend
WIRELESS CART
CONTRIBUTE!
Website: wesleyan.github.io/cmdr
GitHub: github.com/wesleyan/cmdr
CONTRIBUTE!
Mailing List: cmdr-project@googlegroups.com
Check out our other projects at wesleyan.github.io!
Follow @cmdrproject on twitter!
Cost-Effective Classroom Control
By Robert Christensen
Cost-Effective Classroom Control
The cmdr project's presentation at NERCOMP 2014