Poor Mans GoogleEarth

In my last blog, I mentioned that I had gone in and made changes to our thin client build to accommodate running NX sessions along with local RDP. We had another thin client project scheduled for 30-45 days in the future and because I was already in the code it was the best choice to just finish it and roll out all features at the same time.

Our county is doing a cool project to gather GPS information on the squad cars from all of the agencies and build a KML file for Google Earth. This will allow the various departments to see if fellow police officers are nearby. My coworkers did all of the front work and got this connectivity working back to the county. Our police department wanted to display this information on a TV in the 911 center. Instead of allocating a full PC with operating system to this function (a waste), we decided to just build a new kiosk mode on our thin clients. So I made the changes to the build. A chooser comes up, you click on a button and GoogleEarth runs on one of our big servers and remote displays back to the thin client. Easy and works great and saves time and money vs installing a thick client for this function.

The next logical step of their project is trying to get this information into the squad cars. There are many scaling and bandwidth problems with trying this. The hardware in rugged PCs is sub-optimal for this function. These devices are run 5 years, so many of them are very old and would come to a crawl with GoogleEarth installed. There also is the issue of sharing bandwidth of this function with the EVDO cards. The networking already is busy doing mission critical functions and cannot be bogged down with another major feature. Another idea would be to run the Google Earth software on a server with their already existing NX infrastructure, but the prospect of 25+ of these running concurrently was not pleasant.

So I had an idea that we are testing now, which was to create a poor mans Google Earth. This was so simple that it took me literally less than 1 hour to write, test and put on the GNOME menu. A cron job runs every five minutes and does a screen grab of the Google Earth session running in the 911 center and dumps it to an image file. I then wrote a quick Glade/Python UI that simply displays this picture and is on a 2 minute timer and refreshes the image. The memory footprint is very light, and everyone is sharing the same image file. So this should scale wonderfully and will barely produce any server load.

Here is the UI. Buttons are nice and big to accommodate their touch screens and allow them to touch with their fingers in a moving car. The image is in a scroll region to ensure it works correctly with their 800x600 and 1024x768 resolutions.



In the shot below, I have marked the memory footprint of Google Earth on the server. 25+ of these would be quite a load in memory and CPU. That's 25+ users all performing the same steps and retrieving the same information independently...not a good design. The other window shows the very simple code used to grab the screenshot from the 911 center. The script pings the device, if it's alive it grabs a shot, creates multiple scales and then moves the finished product into place. The Glade/UI then loads the image into the canvas.