Tablet as a slide controller
Hi all. I've set up a 10" Android tablet on our church pulpit. It's set to display the OpenLP slide controller web page which allows the preacher to move between Powerpoint slides (the rest of the service is run from OpenLP directly). This works but with some caveats that are causing trouble and I wonder if anyone has successfully worked around them.
- There's no large view of the current slide, unlike Powerpoint presenter mode or the screen we had previously which was wired to the computer as a third monitor duplicating the projector. Neither the website nor the app provide this as far as I can tell.
- The slide controller webpage doesn't always work, I think because you need to login. I get around this by clicking through a few slides at the start of the service and ok'ing the login dialog when it appears. Others don't do this and get into trouble when the preacher can't change his slides. The Android app might avoid this but doesn't present such an intuitive interface for changing slides in my opinion.
- The tablet turns off during the sermon if power saving is on. If it's disabled, it stays on forever, the battery drains during the week and won't charge fast enough to be usable on Sunday. The tablet does not seem to have an option to sleep when unplugged, only a single configurable delay. I might be able to use Kiosk Browser to get around this but I've found it hard to work with in the past.
I can't guarantee that people will do the required pre-service checks to ensure everything is connected and ready to go. I also can't guarantee that things will remain plugged in/unplugged, on/off during the week.
We do have a clicker that we can use but it doesn't always work reliably (distance might be too great, sometimes the dongle needs resetting) and the focus needs to be on Powerpoint or OpenLP which is easy to miss and prevents us from using the computer for anything else during the sermon (it's used for recording the sermon so sometimes levels need adjusting, or we need to add a final last minute song, etc).
Any suggestions for making this system more fail-safe and fool-proof?
Comments
I've created a basic webpage with two iframes side by side and set it up to be served via IIS, the webserver that comes with Windows. The source of the first is set to the slide controller page, the source of the second is set to the main view. In theory this will let the minister control the slides and see a decent sized view of the current slide.
I have yet to test it live. Concerned that the main view might get out of sync. Unsure exactly when this happens. Maybe more frequent when transitions or animations are used but I think I've seen it with basic slides too.