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Building an Unattended Computer Presentation?
hastenslowly asks: "I'm a member of a non-profit Association restoring a 1920's gas station, here in the midwest, for National Historic Register status. I'd like to provide an 24/7 'unattended' audio (visual) presentation for visitors using an 'el cheapo' computer, monitor, and mouse. I'd like to connect the entire thing to the doorbell which, when triggered, will start the presentation. Can anyone steer me to some hardware, software (for whatever OS), programming, newsgroup or any other source of info, so I don't re-invent the wheel when I do this?"
Macro media's website
Author once and deploy anywhere with Director MX 2004, the proven multimedia tool for building rich content and applications for CDs, DVDs, kiosks, and the Internet.
Pretty much the standard for doing Kiosks since the early 90's.
Use this X-10 module to interface to the computer easily. You could roll your own at a lower cost, but this is really easy off-the-shelf method.
For the interface, you could have it fire up an mpeg/divx player, run a flash-based presentation, or run an Impress slideshow. All of the above should work on Windows, MacOS, *BSD, or Linux equally.
You might find the best X-10 software for Linux and *BSD, however.
Opera's "kiosk mode" is intended for just such uses. You get all the benefits of a web browser (links you can select, etc.) and it's neatly and easily secured against general use.
And they have a donation program for worthy causes, so the price might wind up being US$0.00
Have you considered the use of Macromedia Director?
Director has a pile of extensions to allow it to receive input from external apps -- serial port, X-10, etc. It's also much more suited to presentation work than, say, HTML or Powerpoint.
Just use an X-10 contact receiver to your existing doorbell, wire up your Mac/PC/Linux box with a reveiver and software and set your system's macros to emulate keypresses or launch the presentation from a black screen.
The guys above who said just rig an old keyboard's key to start / restart a presentation on a keypress have a great idea as well -- not as elegant, but way cheaper and easier.
The powerpoint viewer software is free, as is the playback component of flash, so if you go down either of those routes, you only need to *build* the presentation with the full version of the software, you don't need it to be on the playback machine.
It would help if you told us more about the presentation, does it need sound? interactivity (beyond the doorbell to start) etc.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Just found this http://www.dmb-ergonomics.com/footmouse.htm for connecting the doorbell pushbutton.