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README.md
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README.md

SSEC Lobby Display

The scripts and other files in this directory are used to configure the displays in the lobby of the AOSS building.

Mini-dashboard

In the lobby there is a small monitor to the left after entering that displays a real-time display of data from the AOSS Tower instrument. This display shows a fullscreen Firefox window showing:

https://metobs.ssec.wisc.edu/aoss/tower/lobby

This page is designed after the legacy Java application by Tom Whittaker. To burn-in on the monitor the display will go black at certain times of the day. A version that does not go black is at https://metobs.ssec.wisc.edu/aoss/tower/lobby24-7. The display is also configured to not start any screensavers or other power-saving techniques to keep it showing the dashboard.

The system driving the monitor is called lobby-rig. It is currently a CentOS system with Gnome desktop environment. The machine is configured to auto-login to the tomw user account (this may be changed in the future). Various scripts are placed in /home/tomw/.config/autostart and /home/tomw in order to get the Firefox window displayed and other configurations set on startup. These files are in the https://gitlab.ssec.wisc.edu/metobs/MetObs Git repository in the lobby_scripts directory and are described below:

  • lobby.desktop: Placed in the autostart directory, this initializes the dashboard by calling the startup.sh script.
  • startup.sh: Placed in the home directory, this starts Firefox pointed to the lobby web page. It also uses the xdotool to make Firefox fullscreen and refresh the page after it is fullscreen. This refresh is a workaround for font sizing issue and can be removed in the future. Currently the version of xdotool that comes with CentOS6 has bugs which cause these xdotool commands to not do anything. As a workaround the "Auto Fullscreen" Firefox extension was installed. After the machine is upgraded to a newer CentOS this shouldn't be needed anymore (hopefully).
  • noscreensaver.desktop: This runs xset.sh at startup.
  • xset.sh: This script sets various settings to make sure a screensaver is is never started.

Weather Underground Data Upload

In the past the lobby-rig machine was also responsible for uploading realtime data to the Weather Underground service (https://wunderground.com). This was done by Java code and used the legacy RAIN API. This is now handled by the AOSS Tower InfluxDB ingest scripts.