lab-utils

Utilities to aid in lab administration

Editing the People Page on the Lab Website

Much of the HTML on the People page of the lab website is automatically generated so as to keep formatting consistent. Two files in this repository, employees.json and loadEmployees.js aid in this. The website, built in WordPress, accesses these scripts from the this GitHub repository.

To add employees to the page, edit employees.json. Editing is fairly straightforward: simply add the new lab mate as an object to the array to which they belong. For example, to add a new graduate student-worker after John Bell's entry, simply write:

  {
    "name":"John Bell",
    "title":"M.S. Student",
    "degrees":[
      {
        "degree":"S.B.",
        "subject":"Mechanical Engineering",
        "institution":"MIT",
        "year":2018
      }
    ],
    "research":"Actuation",
    "alias":"jhbell",
    "image":"http://darbelofflab.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Headshot_edited_small_square.jpg"
    // START NEW CODE
  },
  {
    "name":"George P. Burdell",
    "title":"M.S. Student",
    "degrees":[
      {
        "degree":"B.S.",
        "subject":"Ceramic Engineering",
        "institution":"Georgia Tech",
        "year":1930
      }
    ],
    "research":"Everything",
    "alias":"gpburdell"
    // END NEW CODE
  }
],

To actually change how the HTML is generated from the employees.json file, edit loadEmployees.js.

Making Videos for the Lab Window Monitors

The four lab window monitors can each fit three 16:9 videos stacked vertically. To help generate these videos, you can use make_video_wall.sh. The script uses ffmpeg to take in three videos, add padding to ensure a 16:9 aspect ratio, concatenate them to ensure they are the same duration, stack them vertically, rotate them to display correctly on the monitors, and resize them so that they can be played from the video wall display units.

To use it, you'll need to install the dependency:

$ sudo apt install ffmpeg

Before you run this script, it is recommended that the videos be roughly the same duration. If they are not the same duration, the output video will be larger and there will be more overlap between the videos.

Then, run the following command in the directory containing make_video_wall.sh and the input videos:

$ ./make_video_wall.sh in1.mp4 in2.mp4 in3.mp4 out.mp4

replacing in1.mp4 through in3.mp4 with the videos you'd like to stack together and out.mp4 with the filename you'd like to give the output video for the monitor.