Environment-Simulated-Study-Room

(last updated: February 23, 2015)

Dr. Alan Steele came to our team on behalf of Carleton University's Library proposing a term project to create a projector system for a room in the Library's Dicovery Centre. This room will feature three projectors mounted on the ceiling pointed to three different walls and has speakers that support 7.1 digital surround sound. The idea for the system was to play synchronized video/pictures along the three walls and audio, in order to simulate an outdoor study environment.

This project is a joint effort between the Systems Engineering department and the Philosophy department at Carleton University. We design and implement the system, and the Philosophy students will find the contents that the system will offer to the library.

The Engineering team consisted of:

Haifa Aljasser
Nhat Ho
Itaf Joudeh
Noah Kipin
Brandon To

The following image describes the orientation of the projectors in the room:

Design

The design of the system consists of three parts:

The Scene Manager Subsystem
The Content Distribution Subsystem
The IR Control Subsystem

The Scene Manager Subsystem should provide the user with a GUI to interact with the system. This system will give the user the ability to play/pause/stop/skip and adjust the volume of the scenes. This subsystem will provide an interface for the administrator to do all that a user can, along with upload/edit/delete scenes, and configure system settings. We have decided that a web interface would be best for this task, as it could be easily deployed and also accessed on the library's tablet. This will also save work if the system ever changes platforms. This system will be the only part that the end user will see.

The Content Distribution Subsystem should provide the other systems the ability to play video on the projectors, and audio on the speakers. This system should handle the synchronization of the video output of the three projectors, along with the synchronization of the audio with the video. The content distribution system will control three Raspberry Pi's connected to the three projectors, and one Raspberry Pi connected to the speaker. The Raspberry Pi's will stream video directly from the centralized server. Communication with the Raspberry Pi's will be through RTP.

The IR Control Subsystem should provide the user with the ability to control the scenes through a physical infrared remote control. This subsystem should accept infrared signals from the remote and map it to a subset of the features that the Scene Manager Subsystem's web interface provides. This include allowing the user to play/pause/stop/skip and adjust the volume of scenes. The IR control system will make use of a Raspberry Pi's GPIO pins by connecting an IR sensor to it. The Subsystem will make use of the Raspberry Pi to listen to the IR signals at the frequency of the remote control and send the data to the web service provided by the Scene Manager Subsystem. Communication with the web server will be through HTTP.

Since the IR System is not a part of the website, it was created in it's own repository and can be found here: https://github.com/brandonto/Environment-Simulated-Study-Room-IR-System

The following image is the class diagram of the initial design of the system:

The following image is the use case diagram of system:

Implementation

For the Scene Manager Subsystem, we decided to use the following technologies:

HTML5, CSS (Bootstrap framework), and Javascript (JQuery framework) for the front end of the website
PHP for the backend of the website, due to simplicity and fast deployment time
MySQL for the database, since it plays nicely with PHP
Plupload library was also used

For the Content Distribution Subsystem, we decided on:

VLC media player for the video playback
PHP for interfacing with VLC and providing easy access for the Scene Manager Subsystem

For the IR Control Subsystem, we decided on:

LIRC for the infrared library
C for the easy access to the hardware and execution speed

Integration

Due to our team working closely, integration was not much of an issue. Both the Scene Manager Subsystem and the Content Distribution Subsystem were created using PHP as a backend. This means that integration was simply a matter of calling into the API decided prior to development. The IR Control System was also easily integrated since we decided to communicate through HTTP. This means that PHP handles most of the server side processing of the packets for us and gives us easy access to the data received through PHP's POST method. This leaves us with only the client side construction of the HTTP request to implement and send over the network. Certain areas had to be patched up for everything to run smoothly, but the combined effort took less than a day.

Testing

Testing of the Scene Manager Subsystem was automated through the use of the Selenium web driver and Java's unit testing framework. Manual testing was also done. Through implementing the system, testing was done extensively as well. We have all of our tests cases documented in our project report.

Testing of the Content Distribution System was mostly done manually.

Testing of the IR Control System could not be automated due to somebody having to physically press the IR remote in order for us to receive the signal. Due to the requirements of extended execution time and the time constraints that we had, this aspect could not be tested fully as well.

Difficulties

Some difficulties that arose during the implementation are documented here:

Conclusion

Overall, we think this project was a success. Given the timespan (3 months), we did not meet all of the requirements fully. We only provided support for video, but we believe adding images will be trivial. We did not have time to create a dedicated Android/IOS application to interface with our website. However, on mobile, our websites were very responsive due to JQuery mobile and Bootstrap. We also severely overestimated the capabilities of the Raspberry Pi's. Since we did not get hardware acceleration working on the Raspberry Pi's, the video could not run in full screen, otherwise the processor would crash. The solution would be to migrate to more powerful computers for streaming the video.

This project is currently on hold due to our other classes. We may decide to come back to finish up the implementation during the summer. We would say that this project is currently sitting between 80-90% complete.

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