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The most unhinged video wall, made out of Chromebooks

varun.ch

41–50 of 64 posts

Re: The most unhinged video wall, made out of Chromebooks

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author tried, but the clocks wouldn’t stay in sync. It’s in a sidenote expandable section. > Unfortunately, these Chromebooks could not reliably keep track of time within milliseconds of each other, so this method didn't work for us.

I feel like this deserves a deep dive of its own. Were the clocks drifting substantially over a reasonable time period between syncs (e.g. 24 hours)? Was SNTP not acting reliably? Did they try hosting a local time server?

I was on an IoT project once and surprised to find that when blocked from ntp, PC clocks drift pretty quick. A couple milliseconds per day would not surprise me.

It looked to me like the fleet did consistently fall behind, which seems like thoughtful design - syncing would always cause them to skip ahead and never rewind time

Re: The most unhinged video wall, made out of Chromebooks

#42

I worked at Google when Chromebook shipped. They put out a call for decorations for the lobby and I proposed something similar to this but they said "no" :( Maybe because I asked for 40-64 machines :P I would not have tried to sync video though. Instead I'd have made time based animations and use the network the synchronize the clocks. you can see an example here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64TcBiqmVko It's 8 ma…

The author tried, but the clocks wouldn’t stay in sync. It’s in a sidenote expandable section. > Unfortunately, these Chromebooks could not reliably keep track of time within milliseconds of each other, so this method didn't work for us.

I don't know if syncing the videos would work because of playback issues over time but the aquarium pages sync their clocks every second just asking the server the time (demo time not wall time) over web-sockets and then subtracting 1/2 of the time it took to get a response. I suspect the technique works better for time based animations than video since video require seeking to change the time.

Re: The most unhinged video wall, made out of Chromebooks

#43

Most interesting thing to me is how switching to coreboot fixed the freezing. Do you have a theory of why that might happen? I wonder if it's ACPI/DSDT related or if HW controllers were initialized incorrectly using the original BIOS.

Could also be a watchdog firing?

Re: The most unhinged video wall, made out of Chromebooks

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author tried, but the clocks wouldn’t stay in sync. It’s in a sidenote expandable section. > Unfortunately, these Chromebooks could not reliably keep track of time within milliseconds of each other, so this method didn't work for us.

I feel like this deserves a deep dive of its own. Were the clocks drifting substantially over a reasonable time period between syncs (e.g. 24 hours)? Was SNTP not acting reliably? Did they try hosting a local time server?

Did not get the chance to try much at! We just observed that clocks could be synchronized, but the next time we checked they would no longer be. I agree that this is definitely something that could also be interesting to look into in the future.

Re: The most unhinged video wall, made out of Chromebooks

#45
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! We haven’t figured out what to play on it yet actually - I think the plan is to build out all the tools so that our school can create and upload their own videos (eg. montages of students work - this is in the Design workshop after all) to display on the screen. It could be self-service even after we graduate in June.

I think a very wide game of Pong would be fun!

Me too! Making it do interactive things is actually quite trivial since we went for the socket.io web approach rather than using something specific to video streaming. I'm imagining two QR codes on either end, players join and play a wide game of pong. Maybe with phone gyroscopes for controls.

Re: The most unhinged video wall, made out of Chromebooks

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like this deserves a deep dive of its own. Were the clocks drifting substantially over a reasonable time period between syncs (e.g. 24 hours)? Was SNTP not acting reliably? Did they try hosting a local time server?

I was on an IoT project once and surprised to find that when blocked from ntp, PC clocks drift pretty quick. A couple milliseconds per day would not surprise me. It looked to me like the fleet did consistently fall behind, which seems like thoughtful design - syncing would always cause them to skip ahead and never rewind time

> It looked to me like the fleet did consistently fall behind, which seems like thoughtful design

Thoughtful, but I think it isn’t necessary with ‘modern' NTP algorithms. They lose time by slowing down a clock derived from their hardware clock for a while, not by moving the hardware time back (https://serverfault.com/a/94691, https://community.hpe.com/t5/operating-system-hp-ux/ntp-atom...)

Re: The most unhinged video wall, made out of Chromebooks

#48
Super cool!

We needed to do something similar one time with 5 large touchscreen tvs that were arranged as a table, where each side needed to be a separate touchscreen application with them all playing a synchronized video in the background but users could interact with things flowing from one end to the other and could send objects from their other apps in any direction to other apps, like users sending things they found to the person on the other side of the table.

We ended up with a trashcan mac pro (thats about all we could find in budget that could drive all the screens at the same time) with apps that were synchronized using redis (I wrote that part). It worked really well, though I didnt get to see the finished product before I left that company. But we always really wanted to have separate computers that were synchronized. We just couldnt get that to be reliable enough - it worked for a while but then various things would throw it out of sync, meaning we would have to restart the applications periodically which wouldnt work.

Something I have always wished we had, since the very early days of PCs was the ability to network devices together in such a way that they could share their resources and collaborate more. Imagine being able to take advantage of all of the computers in an office to do a task like a supercomputer. Of course thats a very hard problem, applications and OSs would need to be designed for it and we would need new algorithms (look how long it took us just to take advantage of multiple processors in the same machine on the same board), but there were some projects out there like seti@home and folding@home that did it somewhat, but I always hoped it would be something that the computers themselves would support.

Re: The most unhinged video wall, made out of Chromebooks

#49
> I embarked on the journey of building ‘my own distro’ that we could install on the laptops. The system should start with something minimal (no desktop environment), and have an elegant script to autostart a kiosk mode Chromium instance. I first tried NixOS before quickly realising there was no way it would work with the tiny amount of storage on these Chromebooks (and it failed to install with every single attempt). Then I gave up, started with a Debian minimal install and ... I realised I would be wasting so much time (installing Debian is very ‘hands-on’ - you need to press lots of buttons), and I discovered ‘FAI - Fully Automatic Installation’ and the web FAI.me tool

DietPi, OpenWrt, and OpenBalena have autoinstall options as well that allow you to select specific packages and install on minimal bare metal. I'd be curious if there are other non-desktop options out there..

Re: The most unhinged video wall, made out of Chromebooks

#50
Lenovo Thinkpad 11e aren't junk. I own one with Ubuntu and it still serves me well. Why people in the 1st world disassemble them or throw away rather than upcycling by upgrading OS and donating to the children of the 3rd world, like OLPC used to do? Still half of population doesn't have access to computers. This is hugely missed opportunity to help poor children!
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