Bridging the Gap – Portal

Project Overview

The university recently merged with two other institutions and was looking for a way to connect the communities in a fun way. The solution? To create a TV and webcam on each campus where passer-bys could wave to their peers on the opposite campuses! The project helped to create a sense of unitiy, showing the insitiuion had one mission across multiple locations. Friendships were even made! Special considerations for this project needed to be considered such as:

  • A way to monitor the feed live, and an “emergency stop” button in case an inappropriate interaction as detected
  • a scrolling feed of events for the day.
  • A scheduled off time during the evening – 24/7 uptime and un-manned management of the system

Implementation

A Raspberry pi with a USB connected camera was placed to each location. Only requirements were power, HDMI and wifi. Each pi was set to open a kiosk web browser on boot. As a fail safe were also set to self reboot at 8am and 2pm each day just to self resolve any possible issues. I created a webpage for each location. The webpage used an iFrame one side was ajn embedded webcam service called Whereby which allows for full custimation of their video conferencing platform via perimeters in a URL. The other half was an embedded webpage of scrolling list of events. On the back end was “portal admin page.” Using some basic scripting, the admin page interacted with each location’s webpage – giving it the ability to remotely switch from the whereby video conferencing embed page, to a “we’ll be right back page”. An indiuval in charge of the system can remotely watch the feed from Whereby’s platform and use our admin panel to shut down the feed at all locations, or one specific one .

Try it Yourself

Here is what you’ll need to do this project yourself!

Raspberry Pi 5 Starter Kit

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