dhicks

We use Raspberry Pis, specfifically Pi 3s - the Pi 3 can be powered from the USB port available on most newer TVs, the Pi 4 seems to require a bit too much power. I have them configured as a kiosk with a simple script: https://github.com/dhicks6345789/device-config ...and pointing at a Google Slides document. Free, and easy for admin staff to edit, fitting in to their existing workplace practice and permissions model (i.e. just using Google Workspace). Slides isn't the most flexible of signage software solutions - in kiosk mode, all slides have to have the same transition time, for instance, but mostly it does well enough.

Depending on space available, we've bought several of these: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01MRY9KD9 Floor-standing (not rack mount), can be stood on a standard speaker mount, portable, includes battery, can take input from 3.5mm jack and Bluetooth, output can be sent into larger sound system, has two integrated wireless mics. We're finding they look a bit beaten up after 5 years or so of being hauled around the school, and the batteries now don't hold a usable charge, but if you want a handy all-in-one speaker / mixer unit plus a couple of wireless mics they're reasonably affordable. You should also be able to get replacement wireless mics for when teachers / children loose / eat them.

Could you possibly mean a phantom-powered DI box?: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Behringer-Ultra-DI-DI100-DI-Box/dp/B000CCSWPQ/ref=sr_1_7?crid=2PNL51AARN8NF I'm guessing you have a laptop plugged into your sound system via a 3.5mm stereo cable. You'll need suitible adaptor cables to plug into the DI box from your laptop. You could, of course, add a USB sound interface between your computer and the sound system - the Focusrite Scarlett Solo is what everyone seems to like: https://focusrite.com/en/audio-interface/scarlett/scarlett-solo Although I find the Beringer UM2 to be perfectly usable and a bit more affordable: https://www.behringer.com/product.html?modelCode=P0AVV

For a school, Google Drive / OneDrive might be the most available / cheapest option for file storage and access control, although I'd want at least one other backup / mirror of the document store. I'm pretty sure Google Drive will automatically OCR a scanned PDF, too, OneDrive probably does similar. If that OCR mechanism isn't suitible, I recently saw this Python project: https://pypi.org/project/ocrmypdf/ It looks pretty comprehensive, with options to fine-tune how the OCR is done.

Is that available for individual schools to use, or do you need to get that set up at the the local authority level? It would certainly make sense for state schools, but if nothing else I'd guess the central service is going to want some kind of billing set up. I've found Mailchimp's API for transactional email sends to be easy enough to work with, and sensibly priced - you pay per block of email sends. I think they have a similar structure for SMS.

Depending on the area of the country you're in, 5G might be a cheaper / available option - I've been using Three's 5G home broadband service for several years now, it handles general internet access for two people quite capably, although I'd guess latency is going to be higher than other options. Depending on what you're doing server-side, might it be cheaper to move to hosted services rather than host them yourself?

I've recomended WeVideo in the past - I've not used it for a video slideshow, I'm not sure if it handles photos well or not, but it might be worth a look. It's web-based, nothing to install or download, and there's a free trial period.

How portable? Not quite the same type of device as the speakers you linked to, but we have a pair of these: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B08VDSL596 They link as a pair and connect via bluetooth, so if you're using a PC / laptop you should be able to connect to them for sound output. They are battery powered, but can also be powered from an external USB power bank or USB charger, making them handily portable. I have our ones mounted on mic stands to lift them up of the ground, which works quite nicely as a portable solution.

I use this Toshiba 32" TV at home as a PC screen: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07D2L2ZTR It is a smart TV, but the smart features aren't used and we don't notice them. You could, of course, use a monitor - I have this 32" QHD one in my office: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0777TRHPQ Someone at work has the 4K version: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B09FLKRWJY The first two devices were bought 2018, so 4 years ago, and have been used daily since with no problems. The 4K screen was bought a few months ago and seems to be working very nicely so far.

If you want good-quality gaffer tape, try Flints Standard 50mm wide: http://www.flints.co.uk/pdfcatalogue/adhesivetapes.pdf We find the above is sticky enough so it sticks cables down but peels off easily enough afterwards, not leaving sticky residue. Available in boxes of 24 rolls if you get through a fair bit.

Ah - handy recomendation, thanks. I've just been looking this afternoon at someone who wants a TV mounted on a wall away from where their Sky box is plugged in, I was thinking it might be a bit far for plain HDMI. The solution I've bought for work is a pair of nice Blackmagic HDMI-to-SDI-to-HDMI dongles - they work very nicely, and can run signals for 50+ metres, but they're rather more pricy (£100-ish) than this handy-looking dongle.

I've just found the same thing - I can't connect to our new 3CX VoIP system from my home 5G broadband connection, although other external connections are fine. I'm guessing the provider (Three) blocks VoIP in some way on their home connections, although I haven't looked in to the exact details.

We use a script that runs daily (or on demand) that uses data in iCal format and a template in DOCX format to produce a printable calendar (in DOCX format): https://github.com/dhicks6345789/docx-merge We have this run from a batch file that sync the template file from Google Drive and gets the iCal data from Google Calendar, runs the merge, then uploads the resultant DOCX file back to Google Drive and re-downloads it, this time using Google Drive's export-DOCX-as-PDF option. The above script runs nicely for our setup, it has't been used elsewhere and bits of functionality are missing, but it might provide you a starting point if you want.

As suggested, try Neverware CloudReady (now Chrome OS Flex), although I suspect they might be a little bit low-powered to be a useful general-purpose machine. If they are touch screens, though, and relativly slim they might make handy dedicated kiosk devices for a room bookings system or similar if you can get some varient of Linux (I'd suggest Raspberry Pi OS / Debian) on them.

We use the Logitech K400 - lasts for a fair while on plain AA batteries, has a touch pad combined with the keyboard so the two separate bits don't wander off. The OPS PC should treat the touch display as the main display, with an HDMI (or DisplayPort or something) port for a secondary screen, which you could use as a separate screen for the teacher - remember to swap around the "primary screen" settings in Windows. Depending on how you want to do the video recording, you could use the secondary HDMI output to mirror the display and take that into a video switcher and then into a separate PC for recording / live streaming - you might want to budget for a second small workstation / laptop to sit at the back as a dedicated video recording machine. Personally, I think I'd use a PTZ camera at the back of the room with configurable pre-set positions that can be controlled by the teacher with a remote - nice simple interface, not too much to go wrong. If you're going to set up a room to record sound and video in, you might want to add some decent lighting at the point the teacher will be standing and some sound treatment on the walls / ceiling. We've got on quite nicely with a decently solid music stand - not expensive, and generally quite light and height-adjustable.

Sorry, I have no experience of the particular issue you're trying to fix, I just thought I'd add that you could also look at using pip's (the Python package manager) "requirements.txt" file to configure installed Python packages, possibly at machine boot / user login time.

Depending on age / model of QNAP device, you can add an SSD storage layer to act as a cache to speed up some read / write operations.

Google Docs has a draft / approval feature, and you can link directly to a PDF version of a Docs file. Draft sections of a Docs file aren't included in that PDF version, so you can have various draft sections of a document and, as soon as they are approved, the PDF version (which you can just link to directly from your website) is instantly up-to-date. Word / OneDrive / Sharepoint / Office 365 is quite likely to have a similar feature set.

We use these Busker PA units: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01MRY9KD9 I'm sure they used to be way cheaper than that (now £270), around £130 when we purchased them a couple of years ago. Self-contained, internal battery, can be mounted on a standard speaker stand, comes with two wireless mics, can accept input from a couple of mics / instruments and a stereo connection from a PC / phone. Also acts as a bluetooth device for connecting phones and similar. Also has twin phono outputs for connecting up other devices - buy two and, with a suitable cable, you can link them together, or put the output into pretty much any standard powered speaker. We use these both internally (we have one sat in each hall space) and for outside for things like sports day. They aren't the most robust of devices - most of ours now have broken handles, bent wireless ariels and the phono output sockets are damaged, but devices with more robust (XLR) outputs seem to be rather more expensive.

We've had a 4G / 5G connection at home for several years now - now, around 5:30pm, I'm getting a reading of around 30Mbps download from Google speed test. As already pointed out, now much use for a whole school for general use, but should be enough in the case of the main line going down for admin staff to able to get information home to parents. Same for a power cut - if the power goes out, you'd ideally want a UPS that can keep your network infrastructure up for long enough to give admin staff some time to contact parents and so on. You could possibly just have a (charged) spare laptop and hotspot-capable phone wth a 4G/5G connection as the backup.

Not sure what sort of price you're thinking of, but at the cheaper end (£17) we are using these: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B08DJYNSC8/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title They seem to have a wider field of view than most built-in laptop cameras and produce a perfectly decent image. Sound seems okay, although I doubt they would pick up speech from much further than a few metres from the screen.

Yes, pretty much. You might want to create a separate account for adding devices with just the permissions needed for adding devices, then you're not logging on to your fully-privileged admin account each time you add a device. "apps" on ChromeOS might be different to what you're thinking of from iOS / Android. Most of the apps we use are web-based, you just point the children at a login page. Ideally, any such application would use Google logins so they just get logged straight in. You can push out ChromeOS / Android apps, but we've generally gone for web-based instead. Settings can be added per-device but, quite often, are per-user. This is quite useful as a pupil should get the same settings and apps available no matter what device they log on to, even a home device if they log on with their school account. We have our junior devices (up to Year 3) log in with a default guest session, so they open the device and it just starts up. That session is reasonably limited - they can't get to YouTube on it, for instance. Each child does have an individual login, so in Year 3 they can start to log on to websites using their username and password, and by Year 4 they've generally all got the idea.

SQLite is implemented as a library that gets compiled into the finished application, rather than as a separate service / server that an application communicates with. You should be able to create, add to and read from a database file all from an application without needing to use the command line. For beginner programmers, that might be simpler - less different tools to switch between. It probably isn't very easy for the beginner to visualise the structure and content of a database, though, hence why you normally install some command-line tools to help you create and manipulate databases. As others have pointed out, graphical tools are probably going to be better for this as they should be able to show structure and content of a database in a nice visual way.

Indeed - you get a wodge of XML, which I find more useful to re-write as CSV containing just the bits we need. Something which tripped me up: the batch API caches results, and has a configurable (in the settings for each API key) cache retention time, minimum one hour. So it's not worth having a script run more than once an hour as data will only refresh hourly. That might be different for the local version, of course. I'd tend to stick with using their API, just in case you shift to the hosted version in the future and want to keep using your scripts.

I'm mostly using Python, with a few bits of Windows (well, DOS, really!) batch file thrown in. If you have existing scripts expecting CSV files in a particular format it should be a reasonably simple (if possibly slightly tedious) job to get XML data from iSAMS' API and have something re-write that into CSV - that's what my scripts are doing, then we wind up with a bunch of CSV files we can use for various purposes. If it's any help, I have a repository of scripts available: https://github.com/dhicks6345789/data-tools Probably not very useful in most cases, but "getData.py" does at least give an example of how to get data from the iSAMS API.