Blackboard

Goal

The goal of this project is to develop software (and possibly hardware) for an E-paper blackboard that can be used like a graphic tablet. The software will allow basic operations like writing, erasing, drawing curves, moving content, vectorizing and zooming to be processed locally and advanced operations (e.g. OCR) and rendering tasks to be provided through a server. This may include the execution of Java applets locally.

In a second stage the project will probably aim to develop a hardware specification for a blackboard with an embedded controller that allows to perform the local operations without an attached computer. Remote functions may include rendering of OpenOffice, PDF, LaTeX, MathML, WikiTeX, DVI (per dvisvgm?) GNU TeXmacs and HTML content to the board. Preformatted content and some content formats (e.g. a subset of SVG) should be readable from a MMC card without an attached computer. The demonstration version runs in a window but the final version will run in fullscreen mode.

Status

The project is currently inactive. A very early Demonstration Applet and a Webstart version (not functional with current Java version) that includes Apache Batik are available.