#newengineer

I need to get this out in the ether because I know at some point i will completely forget what I wrote so here it goes. 

This front end of this application is a simple graphical user interface written in HTML, CSS, and some Javascript. 

the most important part of this front end is in the javascript where, when a button is pressed, some attributes of the button are changed, most importantly the name.

The back end part of the App is written in javascript where I essentially have a main loop continuously check to see if a button is clicked by checking the name attribute of each button . I feel like this is a pretty sloppy way of doing button commands via a GUI and that doing it purely in tkinter or even labview might be better, but when I started this project I thought I could do the whole thing with just selenium and javascript node.js but I quickly realized how much of a pain thatd be. Also I knew that python had a library that could build an executable extremely easily so I went with python, but I digress. 

Lets say that one of the top 3 rectangle buttons were clicked. I would catch the name change with my loop. Each one of these buttons represented a scene in a media app. For example “instructor only” is a scene that contains only a feed of an auto tracking camera, “Instructor and projector” is a scene where a picture in picture of the camera feed with the projector, both of which are fed into SDI slots in the back of an automate select. More on this later, actually screw it we’ll do this now.

Pause from the code and lets get into the hardware. The goal of the project was to be able to produce high quality recordings of lectures for students to use for studying, missed classes, etc. Since this was for the world famous USAF Test Pilot School, they spared no expense. So the proposed solution was to get two extremely good auto tracking cameras, equipped with a control box and we had to fit it into the existing system. 

The system in place was fairly simple. A professor would put a powerpoint on his/her computer which would display on 1 of 3 screens. Each one of these screens would also display a respective projector so that the students could see. Also the feeds of the screens would split to another piece of hardware that we don’t really care about.

The camera control hardware was also responsible for recording the lectures as well. However it was designed to be used for two cameras and a projector feed in 1 classroom, not two. 

Anyways. In order to cycle through the projector feeds so that the correct screen gets recorded on the control hardware we installed a programmable Kramer switch that can accept three inputs and output one.