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

[S.Booth]

On Tue, 24 Jun 2003, Douglas Baggett wrote:
> 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?
> 

I would think it would be better to trigger the light-bulb based on
audio transmit rather than video.
I know 2 ways of doing this.

1) The UCL RAT has seperate gui and engine components that communicate via
the mbus (TTL 1 multicast packets) It should not be too hard to evesdrop
on this information to pick up the talk button.

2) The gentners have an external port that you can program the behaviour
of. I think its possible to map mike mute to these pins to give you 
a hardware mute button and status light. Of course this is in addition to
the RAT controls but it gives the session attendees a way of muting their
microphones independently of the node-op which is no bad thing.


				Stephen

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|epcc| Dr Stephen P Booth             Project Manager           |epcc|
|epcc| s.booth at epcc.ed.ac.uk          Phone 0131 650 5746       |epcc|
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