Forgive me if I'm not using the proper terminology or not explaining
this properly. This aspect of running a small business is foreign to me.
My wife and I run a small independent coffee shop and I'm the geek in
charge. I've got m0n0wall running great with the customer wifi on DMZ and
all our machines on a private LAN. We've got a recycled Pentium 4 running
Debian stable for our Music Player Daemon server. Motherboard is a Tyan
with real serial ports.
We have a mid-line Casio cash register setup that has 2 serial ports. 1
is dedicated to the credit card machine. The other can be connected to a
serial pole display. I understand that this second serial port outputs
formatted text of all buttons pressed and transactions processed.
This is also useful for overlaying this text with a CCTV camera connected
to a DVR. Though, this setup limits how you can search for mistakes or theft,
having to sift through hours of video.
I'd like to do the following with Debian: Use the text from the serial
port in conjunction with an IP network camera connected to our server. I'd
like to be able to search the text for particular triggers, e.g., look at
video whenever someone hits the NS (no sale) key to open the drawer.
I think I can connect the Casio to one of the serial ports on the server and
capture data through tty(?).
The text would not necessarily need to be overlayed but must sync with the video.
The Casio has a pretty accurate clock, running on 60Hz; the IP camera can
sync via NTP on our m0n0wall router.
I've Googled a few commercial solutions but they are very expensive and
are proprietary. One is this:
http://www.geovision.com.tw/english/Prod_GVDataV3E.asp
I'm thinking something like this must have been done with Linux for other
fields, e.g., scientific sensors outputting text on a live stream.
Any ideas or suggestions?