i.MX515 Project
The Travelling Coach Problemin category Multimedia
proposed by kralikba on 24th March 2009
Project Proposal
ProblemThere are a lot of such professional consultants who travel around a large city or even a larger region and do presentations and teach new methods to people to increase their skills.
These training sessions are information-centric: some slides are shown and then some group work is done based on some more information. Thus the trainer has to carry around specially-crafted DVDs, a projector and his/her own notebook computer. Trainees have to hand in their course projects in an electronic format; these documents have to be collected and archived so that certifications for the course can later be checked.
The workflow ends at this archival stage. Sometimes being offline from the Internet can also be a big problem. (In my area this is an often appearing problem.)
Proposed solution
Based around the i.MX515 chip we could craft a small device, that
-can be directly connected to a projector
-has onboard storage for the information needed
-has a small remote control
-is able to act as a Wi-Fi access point
-is based on Linux.
If we build some software for this device, that
-allows for access point-local sharing of e-learning material
-allows for one-touch access to selecting an active course material
-restricts access based on these selections
-collects hand-ins and archives them to an Internet destionation as soon as connectivity is available and
-renders the presentation and transmits it to the projector,
we can reduce the set-up time of equipment and other operational workload of these highly qualified but most of the time non-technical personnel.
Real breakthrough can however be done if we integrate this device into a projector. I believe you have already had problems connecting your notebook to a projector and then asking Windows/Linux to send the picture etc.
On the software side it is possible to integrate Moodle and OpenOffice with some custom software for the interface so that the user experience is seamless.
The i.MX515 is particularly ideal to the task as it has:
-Video decoder for presentations or simply for movie watching
-HD720p output (if attached as an external device)
-Display correction (if integrated into a projector)
-Graphics acceleration for presentations (e.g. most current Pocket PCs cannot handle complex animations at 25 fps even at a low, VGA resolution)
-USB host functionality (for displaying external content)
Further possible non-core enhancement:
-If we build a projector on this platform and integrate a low-resolution camera we can perform automatic trapezoid correction and image rotation for the picture.
External hardware required:
-A highly effective WiFi interface
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