I've set up a jitsi terminal on the wall in Sudoroom!
It's a big TV made by Hitachi, and it has a feature where it can go into "power
saving" mode when the HDMI signal is lost. That means the screen can power
down when DPMS puts the monitor to "sleep". It has a webcam that's clearly
labeled, and on a hinge so it can easily be aimed down at the floor if people
are shy, and it has a Jabra USB speaker/microphone thing which should hopefully
provide good speakerphone functionality. I have the computer setup to start
firefox, and i have firefox set to open the jitsi page, where permissions are
already enabled for webcam/audio. The only remaining need is to automatically
wake the monitor from sleep (using "DISPLAY=:0 xset force dpms on") whenever
there is anyone else detected in the jitsi "room"
This feature is important so that people can see (on the screen) whenever
someone is in the screen/camera/microphone with them. For now the monitor is
either left on a lot, or blanks out due to a timeout.
I've determined that the most direct ways to make the monitor turn on when
anyone joins the jitsi channel are:
1. make an XMPP client in python or something, which connects to the server and
finds out how many people are in the room (and whether there's anyone other
than the telescreen in there) and sets the monitor on/off state accordingly
2. make a browser extension to find the element containing the number of
"Meeting participants" and copy the number to the window title, where it can be
observed from the shell with a command like wmctrl -l
<div class="jss52">Meeting participants (2)</div>
unfortunately the div class is not always jss52 but the innertext is always
Meeting Participans(#) so it should be able to be found.
The idea is that with this setup, people can go on jitsi and talk to whomever
is in sudoroom, as well as each other.
presently i'm using this link but that can change if we find something better:
https://meet.waag.org/turtlesturtlesturtles
note: the telescreen in sudoroom is not signed in right now, not sure why but
i'll fix it asap