Wednesday, February 24, 2010 7:43 AM
Our Info Terminal loads its content from a web server via Web Services. We built a full scalable Silverlight Homepage, in which we can edit the contents for the Info terminal. Our Info Terminal application runs on a Tahoe II developer board.
The interface for the page is easy to use. At first you have to login as an Administrator. Then you can add edit or delete news entries. You are also able to set an entry as invisible. A news entry can consist of a picture and as a text content. Internally the Homepage works with WCF Web Services. The Service scales the image into an adequate format for the Tahoe II display and saves the picture on the server.
We made two versions for the Info Terminal:
In one version we saved the picture in the database of the server and received it via the Web Service. In this version we had a problem with the base64 decoding. The whole communication worked very well, but the Deserializer took very much time to decode the picture.
This problem made us to develop an easier way to transmit the picture. Now the Tahoe II receives the news-entries with the URL of the image via Web Services and then loads the image separately over a HTTP connection.
The interface of the Micro Framework Application is also very easy. At first you have to login as a user. Then you get a list of 20 news entries maximum. Only the header and a small picture are shown. If you click on a news entry, you can see the whole news entry with its text. You can also click on the picture to see the picture in a bigger format, scaled to the display size of the Tahoe II. Every 30 seconds the Info Terminal polls if there are new news or an entry was edited. If a change is detected, the Info Terminal will update its content.
We completed this project as a final year project at school. At this point we want to thank DI Waser for his technical support and the idea for the project.
Within the next 2 weeks we will publish a YouTube-video of the project. There we can show the whole functionality of the project.
Please give a feedback: baul_baumgartner@yahoo.de