I wrote a little PHP-script that extracts the most important and current data from MRBS’s MySQL database and just prints them in a simple HTML file. Its not pretty but good for bandwith and clarity. We use it to display information on an energy efficient e-ink screen in front of conference/computer rooms.

$date is set like this:

$date = date("Y-m-d");

The SELECT-statements go like this, where N is the ID of the room(in the database, not what you might call it)

SELECT name,description,from_unixtime(start_time),from_unixtime(end_time) FROM mrbs_entry WHERE from_unixtime(start_time) LIKE '%" . $date . "%' AND room_id = N;

I’m not gonna explain here how to establish a database connection in PHP, but you can have a  look at the whole sourcecode at github 😉

I then cut off the date with substr() because it’s always 10 characters in front of time->(YYYY-MM-DD) and printed it via echo. This is the simple version, there is a version with tables on github.

while($row=mysql_fetch_row($qry01)) {
echo "- <strong>Room</strong> 01 | <strong>Desc:</strong>" . $row[0]." - ".$row[1]." |  <strong>Time:</strong> ". substr($row[2],10) . " - " . substr($row[3],10) . " <br />";
}

update: I wrote another version that prints JSON objects which can be parsed on the other side. For easier parsing(e.g. if everything is in one String) I numbered them:

$jsonarray = array('begin' . $i => substr($row[2],11, 5), 'end' . $i => substr($row[3],11,5), 'name' . $i => $row['name'], 'description' . $i =>  $row['description']);

You’ll find the whole thing on github.