Raspberry Pi/Projects/Wallboards

Revision as of 18:33, 19 March 2015

Overview

Project was tasked to create a replacement solution for a grid of 6x1 100" projector screens displaying a shoretel call center queue and details.
New office space does not have a NOC, only an 8ft ceiling, and the call center cubicles are surrounded by a glass wall to the outside, allowing lots of sunlight. This would prevent projectors from being used.
The shoretel application on runs on Windows.
It was thought that the shoretel API may be able to be utilized, but unfortunately it alone does not provide enough access to information and direct calls against the SQL Database would be needed. With this discovered, it was decided the development work would be too great.

Requirement

Create 4 clusters of 6 monitors, 3 facing one way and 3 facing the other, that hang from the ceiling using mounts (similar to an airport or trader setup) above 4 cubicles all facing towards them. On the walls, mount (4) large LCD screens.
The 6 monitor clusters would be close to the analysts and provide detailed information about specific call queues while the large LCD screens would provide a graphical representation of the current queue count in graph format.
The outside monitors of each row display the same information while the middle ones display different information.

Problem

The classical method of sending signals to these monitors would be to utilize 5 strand RGB cables to each monitor and run them back to repeaters to duplicate signals. This has the drawbacks of an excess of cabling needed, signal repeaters which can be unreliable, and no way to individually customize each screen if desired.

Solution

Use a raspberry pi 2 for each monitor, driving the signal from the hdmi out. The raspberry pi would then VNC into a windows VM running the required software and displaying the call center information.