[AG-TECH] Triggering red light bulb with VIC - seriously!!!

[Allan Spale]

Doug,

This idea was discussed at one point in October 2000.  You can view some
of the musings on the topic at: 
http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/web-mail-archive/lists/ag-tech/2000/10/threads.html
and do a search for "ON-AIR".  My supervisor obtained equipment called
PicoWeb (http://www.picoweb.net)  that would allow the interface between
the light and the software trigger (via some Internet protocol). 

Unfortunately, after digging through the source code of RAT and not
knowing anything about Tcl/Tk (the GUI scripting attached to C code), I
decided that it was not worth the effort.  However, you may be much more
skilled than I am at reading Tcl/Tk and C code and figuring out how what
component is relevant to you.

This goes back to a basic point that there is important information in RAT
that would be useful to other programs.  You want to know if the Talk
button is pressed in RAT and directly tie that to a physical light.  One
other item that other people considered for a while is to determine which
site(s) are talking in RAT and could VIC bee notified to highlight the
group of video windows to identify who is speaking or in your case-- is
the Talk button pressed).  One could even use the streams from each RAT
site to interface into a separate closed-captioning component that could
be combined with some video compositing that could place the text over the
VIC video window.

The good news is that we are living in the world of AG 2.  Perhaps by
repackaging and enhancing RAT to work within the AG framework, this might
be possible.  For instance, maybe a shared application or node service
could be written that interfaces a RAT event (i.e. pressing the Talk
button) with triggering a light in the real world.

Good luck with your efforts in making this work.


Allan
EVL at UIC
Research Assistant
 

On Tue, 24 Jun 2003, Douglas Baggett wrote:

> So,
> 
> We were brainstorming about why people think they can "Chat" in the the 
> background while other people are talking during a grid session and my 
> boss was wondering if there was a way to trigger a Red light bulb (like 
> in the old Radio studio days) when the vic transmit check box is 
> selected to indicate we were "on air"
> 
> I was thinking that If there was a way to detect it, it would be fairly 
> easy to write some perl to trigger something home-made through the 
> serial port (at least on linux).
> 
> Can anybody think of a way to detect "transmit" in ovic or uclvic?
> 
> thanks!
> 
> Doug B
> CISE/NSF
>