Re: Status display monitors

[Mohan Ramanathan <mohan@aps.anl.gov>]

hi Nick:

At APS we use video feed from various devices.  Most of the feed are from MEDM
displays operating on either sun workstations or LINUX or PC windows.
 We use frame grabbers to grab the video.

There are small embedded PC we use from Diamond systems.   I have tested with
LINUX and MEDM and plan to switch some of the WINDOWS based to LINUX running fedora.

It is very easy to fix these machines arround your facilty and I can assure you
that the quality of the doisplay will be far far superior tahn anything you do
with VIDEO unless you use  HDTV signals.

Also another posibility is to run web browsers in full screen modes arround the
facility on any old machines and make them auto refresh or even use java based
tools...


good luck
mohan


----- Original Message -----
From: "Rees, NP (Nick)" <nick.rees@diamond.ac.uk>
Date: Thursday, July 6, 2006 2:53 am
Subject: Status display monitors
To: tech-talk@aps.anl.gov
Cc: "Friedrich, T (Tina)" <tina.friedrich@diamond.ac.uk>, "Ferner, FJ
(Frederik)" <frederik.ferner@diamond.ac.uk>, "Leech, MA (Mike)"
<mike.leech@diamond.ac.uk>

> This is not directly an EPICS issue, but I am hoping someone in the
> EPICS community can help me (or knows someone who can help).
> 
> At DLS, we are looking for status display monitors to be placed around
> the site. In the past these would have been video fed, but I 
> believe all
> we have placed at the status display points are Cat6 network sockets,
> and we are looking at economical ways of generating status displays.
> 
> I have looked at the panel PC's available, but they seem quite 
> expensiveand I suspect that a small embedded PC + a monitor may be 
> cheaper. The
> system must boot linux without a disk, be an x86 architecture and 
> have a
> graphics card and Ethernet socket.
> 
> If anyone has any experience with this and has any suggestions, or can
> propose any alternative architectures that might work, please 
> contact me
> with ideas off-line.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Nick Rees
> Principal Software Engineer           Phone: +44 (0)1235-778430
> Diamond Light Source                  Fax:   +44 (0)1235-446713
> 

 ---------------------------------------------------------------------
Mohan Ramanathan                         Critical Component Sys. Mgr. 
mohan@aps.anl.gov                        Advanced Photon Source
(630)-252-3773/ (630)-822-5625(cell)     Argonne National Laboratory
(630)-252-7187 (FAX)                     Argonne, IL 60439
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