dhicks

I have a project which might be the kind of solution you are looking for: https://github.com/dhicks6345789/web-console It allows you to give end users a simple web-based interface to trigger and see the output from server-side command-line applications / scripts. It installs as a service on your server, with binaries currently available for Windows and Linux. It has various options for authentication, including integration with Google / Microsoft single sign on, but some of those features are still being worked on. I have the application running on a Windows server and able to trigger tasks defined in the Windows Task Schedular via a command line, so admin staff can trigger a run of a task that they would otherwise have to wait for.

Cheaper (£14 each) 9-key keyboards available on eBay: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/304795412176 I reckon just remove the middle key and rest a stick with 4 (or maybe 8) side flanges in the hole. Bit of card / wood over the top with a hole in the centre - probably easy enough to have custom decal stickers if you wanted to have pupils able to design their own. Edit: I've ordered one to try out - shipping from China, so will be a couple of weeks.

Ah! If you combined that with a simple 9-key USB keyboard: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mechanical-Multifunctional-Programmable-Adjustable-Compatible/dp/B08V4PKKJY Stick some kind of box around it with a hole in the top for the joystick - you might even find it can handle 8 directions (diagonals as well as straights). Turns out using the WASD keys as arrow / joystick controls is a kindof-a-standard, so if you programmed the keyboard to be W=up, S=down, A=left and D=right (or just programmed them as arrow keys) it might even work with existing games.

I think what you're asking for is a simple joystick that emulates a keyboard, sending (say) "1" for up, "2" for right, etc. I've not seen a joystick like that, but I have used this footswitch: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B08DSLD1KQ/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title The above is programmable via some Windows-only software to emulate any keypress (or several keypresses, I think), once programmed it can be used on any Windows PC / Mac / Chromebook / Raspberry Pi / etc. I used four, programmed to "a", "b", "c" and "d", for a very simple quiz system, with the foot pedals used as answer buzzers: https://www.sansay.co.uk/quiz/ The software for programming the footswitches is available here: https://www.software.pcsensor.com/pc_en.html I see on that page this seems to be the same company that makes the various cheap USB temperature sensors available on Amazon, which can also report values via simple keyboard emulation. I have some scripts for the Raspberry Pi for use with their TEMPer temperature sensors if that's any help. You could try constructing a joystick from four single keys in a box with a stick in the middle. Single programmable USB keys are available: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003402586960.html You'd need four, and probably a small USB hub, so probably around £50 for parts before you start.

Ooh - same question!

It also gives staff somewhere to remember to put the walkie talkie back, otherwise they can tend to get left around the building.

We bought some cheap ones from Amazon - they were handily rechargeable from USB-powered cradles, which made finding power supplies for them a bit easier.

My thoughts exactly - I can find a handy-looking CCTV case for the Raspberry Pi, complete with wall bracket: https://thepihut.com/products/pi-zero-camera-case Hardware parts cost, including the case, Pi Zero and camera module,, is around £60, it might be a bit more for a fancier lens. The Pe Zero is currently listed as out-of-stock on Pi Hut, which might explain why it's possibly not as popular a platform for CCTV at the moment.

You should be able to set protected access to YouTube from the Google admin console, so pupils can see only videos that have been approved by a member of staff (any pupil / any member of staff - I don't think the system had any facility for setting up groups or anything). Sorry, I can't remember where the appropriate setting is or exactly what it's called - it'll be in an OU somewhere on the admin console. If pupils will have Chromebooks out on the desk during lessons to listen to tracks then staff can see what they're playing. We have Chromebooks where the screens can flip all the way back, "tent" mode is quite handy for this kind of thing. If you want to point pupils at a handy playlist of white noise tracks then you can put a bunch of links in a simple Google Sites page.

Just post questions in the appropriate forum as they come up - I find the best way to learn is to have a specific target to aim for and then figure out how you get there. Do bear in mind this forum is populated mostly by people working in UK schools, so any answers you get are going to have a few assumptions to them. In particular, anything you're doing on a client-side machine (a Windows / Mac workstation) would generally assumed to be on a corporate / classroom machine, the kind of thing you can wipe-and-reinstall if anything goes wrong - it might be a good idea to have a test machine or two to hand rather than working on your only working machine.

The controller is simply seen as a USB webcam, you should be able to use it in OBS or (in our case) Google Meet or pretty much anything else. You might want to think / plan out how you want to do audio. I think you can simply use the audio from each HDMI input, but if you have a speaker talking you probably want to stick with the same audio input while you're switching around video inputs, although maybe you'd want sound mixed together if you were showing the speaker's laptop and that had someyhing with audio on. You might want to have a lavalier mic on the speaker or something. I think the Atem Mini has at least one or two separate audio inputs, I can't remember - I haven't had much chance to use ours yet.

We simply bought a 4-input Blackmagic Atem Mini: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/atemmini Around £300, so might be quite affordable instead of hiring. You'll need cameras with clean HDMI outputs, we found our basic Panasonic camcorders to be perfectly fine, although they did need a mini-HDMI output cable. If cable runs are over 5m or so (which they probabluy will be), you'll be wanting to convert HDMI to / from SDI to run over distance, again we bought the Blackmagic converters, around £50 each. You'll need someone sat in front of the controller to switch between camera angles / input devices, and if you want one of those channels to be whatever is on the presenter's laptop you'll want an HDMI splitter of some sort so you can output to the screen and your controller. The controller is seen by a PC / laptop / Mac / Chromebook as a simple USB camera, so should work with pretty much any video conference software you want. If you want to go for the full TV studio effect, you can get wheels to go on the bottom of standard camera tripods, letting you move cameras around as on a TV studio floor, although you'll need to figure out how you handle cables.

Has anyone tried / looked at using Raspberry Pi based CCTV cameras? I see that there are some designed-for-CCTV cases available, so you pretty much just purchase the appropriate Pi device, along with camera module and probably PoE adaptor, then screw it all together and plug it in. It's the sort of thing that's simple enough when you know what you're doing, but you'd think / hope there'd be someone who could supply and support pre-made Pi cameras.

We have some of the TTS USB headphones. They have lasted very well compared to other ones, however we find by Year 6 the children are complaining the elasticated "pull-together" action on the headphone cups makes them a bit uncomfortable. If you're using headphones with laptops or all-in-ones we find you don't generally need on-headset mics, the built-in mics in the device do okay.

Actually, the average Chromebook (or Windows equivilant) is very similar - the Asus C214 is about the same size as that HP TC1100, with a screen that flips over to become a tablet, plus has a stylus. Those wearable-on-your-wrist computers look very similar to the tablets used by some wait staff in cafes / resturants these days - tablets have gotten lightweight enough that you can have one strapped to your arm for handy access if you have that kind of job.

£50-ish - do you reckon they're worth buying for non-Shure mic packs (so maybe another £20 for an adaptor)?

There's been several discussions on here recently about various microphone setups. If you don't know about licensing for wireless mics already, this handy guide is quite useful: https://www.canford.co.uk/TechZone/Article/UKLegalRadioMicFrequencies That £40 GearForMusic headset operates on 175MHz, so license-free but might be subject to interference. In practice, we have a couple of similar-quality handheld mics on the same license-free frequency range kicking around the main hall for people to use as needed and they're fine for assemblies and similar. There doesn't seem to be issues with interference, and we're right on a busy street in central London. It's the kind of price where it's not a complete diaster if someone breaks / wanders off with the equipment, so having a couple of cheap mics to hand for daily use might be an idea. We bought a set of 8 wireless mics that operate on the WiFi band (starting at 2,400MHz). They were a bit more expensive than £40 a headset, but not hugely so. Again, we don't seem to have had issues with interference, despite having wireless networking kit all around the building.

That sounds good, thankyou. Might it reduce your workload if the presentations were pre-recorded? The format of the presentations seems to be that the person talks their way through a slideshow, not really having time / concentration to answer any questions until the end. A pre-recorded video with a question-and-answer session at the end might give you better audio quality / slicker presentation and take up less of the presenter's time. Any questions we ask along the way the presenter would have a bit of time to think about the answer, too.

Boxphish webinar: very useful, is there a specific thread for follow-up questions?

An email today a user reported as spam: "Good day and all the best to you. Most companies are marrying policies and processes for internal decision making around technology goals and business goals. This is impacting all levels of business, like organizational charts and the workflow of decision making processes." That seems to be the whole content of the email - I'd assumed there'd be a link somewhere poitning to a dodgy spam / malware endpoint of some kind, but the email seems to just be plain text. It seems it might actually be a legitimate, if very vauge, email.

EduGeek's webinar from Tuesday from Google about their various handy development tools might be worth a quick skim: EduGeek.net - EduGeek January Webinars - Recordings

Indeed, although we have a tub of Pi 3s and 4s spare at the moment, so I plan to use a Pi to get a basic temperature sensor working in the server cupboard and see where we go after that. Ah ha - what would you recommend? I was looking at adafruit.io, but even the paid-for version (60 data points per minute) seems like it might not scale if we wind up with (say) each classroom having a sensor and reporting half-a-dozen measurements every few minutes. I could, of course, write something basic to listen out at an HTTP(s) endpoint to collect data (devices would do "post apikey=123456 devicekey=123456 tempc=29") and have it dump that data somewhere periodocally, but I figured there must already be a tested / supported solution for that. RabbitMQ seems like it might be a solution, but I'd still need to write something that runs as a process that collects and processes the queued data periodically.

Just looking a bit further at this today. Some very rough pricing: Pimoroni Raspberry Pi Zero WH Essentials Kit: £42 Pimoroni Breakout Garden Mini: £10.80 Pimoroni SCD41 CO2 Sensor Breakout: £54.60 That's £107.40 for parts, not including an exact-sized case to hold everything. So far I've found adafruit.io, freeboard.io and thingspeak.com that have some kind of IoT-type data storage facility, although I'm not really sure how any of those work quite yet.

Ah - interesting. We had one of their salespeople in to talk about their door-entry devices, I didn't speak to them but I gather we weren't impressed by them, however your actual implemented experience sounds very good. I gathered their CCTV cameras were re-badged Hikvision devices, managed by their own software (although possibly still with Hikvision firmware), would you have any idea if that is correct? Am I right in thinking that when you say "Raspberry Pi based" you are talking about their environment monitoring kit, or are other bits of equipment (door entry, CCTV cameras) based on Raspberry Pis too?

I've looked at them, thinking for general CO2 / air quality monitoring. Do you have multiple Raspberry Pis around the building collecting data? If so, how do you gather that data into some kind of report and/or get alerts when there's an issue?