Green Public Computer Lab using Single-Board Computer and Interactive Computer System

The new computer reservation system is designed for public free computer lab in education institutes. The new system shut down the idle computer in the lab (computer without reservation) which can significantly lower electricity bill. Most students can faster sign-in to the lab and fairly share computer resource among other students through the interactive kiosk and touch screen. A low-power interactive kiosk is designed using Raspberry Pi and touch screen monitor.

1. Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi is a credit card size single-boarded computer with built in graphic processor and network interface. It draws only approximately 2W of electricity but its computing performance is very efficient. Raspberry Pi 2, Model B with 900MHz Quad-Core ARM CortexA7 CPU was used as an interactive kiosk. This kiosk is using touchscreen monitor and connected with barcode scanner for user authentication.

2. Interactive kiosk

They provide useful information and some services to the users. The integration of touchscreen monitor makes the interactive kiosk more useful and more interesting.

The authors use interactive kiosk in the museum for providing 3-D display of items to visitors. Moreover, the works in developed the interactive map controlled with pointing gesture. Pidora Linux was used for the operating system installed on Class 10 SD-Card on Raspberry Pi 2. The Raspberry Pi 2 will provide web browser for computer reservation system which fetched from a web server on a virtual machine.

3. Design of new system

To integrate and control every computer in the lab, a lightweight program was developed which can be run as a Windows service. Program develop using Microsoft Visual Studio Express 2012. First, the program automatically initializes itself when the booting of client is finished (delayed start). Next, the program makes a connection to web server through REST API and query if it’s reserved. If there is a reservation, it will keep polling on web server every N seconds (N=30 for this implementation). Otherwise, it will shutdown itself through Windows API. Each reservation length for 2 hours.

Reference :

Dolwithayakul, B., Boonnasa, P., Klomchit, S., & Tuwachaosuan, S. (2016). Green public computer lab using single-board computer and interactive computer reservation system. ICSEC 2015 - 19th International Computer Science and Engineering Conference: Hybrid Cloud Computing: A New Approach for Big Data Era, 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSEC.2015.7401420