Launchpad: An Open Source Tool by Bluecadet

Introducing Launchpad

Launchpad was developed to meet the unique challenges posed by Bluecadet exhibit projects, which often involve content-heavy experiences, native apps, and long runtimes that can span for years. With our applications distributed across large fleets of computers, we needed a robust solution that could ensure stability and seamless operation. Launchpad was built to address these specific requirements as well as many others, and has reduced our time spent at installs so our team can focus on true innovation.

What Launchpad Solves

Before Launchpad, we had long install checklists for each PC that required manual configuration and testing. However, this was prone to errors and time-consuming to manage.

Tired of spending days poring over punch lists and browsing the most esoteric corners of operating systems, we knew we needed a better solution. That’s why we set out to build a suite of scripts that would automate every step of the process—Launchpad.

Most of our installations connect to a CMS to regularly pull content that our clients edit. Launchpad handles this by efficiently syncing text and media with all of the common CMS platforms we use, like Contentful, Sanity, Strapi, WordPress or Drupal.

And if things go wrong—like a network outage or a corrupt file—Launchpad will roll back to a working set of content from the previous day.

Why You Should Use Launchpad

Launchpad significantly simplifies our process of installing complex interactive programs across museums, institutions and other large venues. It takes the guesswork out of configuration and reduces days of work down to minutes for us. We use it on all of our exhibition installations, including over 20 media programs at the MIT Museum.

What Launchpad Can Do

• Run multiple apps in parallel, with control over launch sequence and window order
• Fail gracefully and restart apps when they exit
• Automate PC configuration for exhibit environments, e.g. disable consumer features like edge swipes, notifications, updates and prevent PCs from going to sleep
• Sync content from APIs like Sanity, Strapi, Contentful, Airtable, and generic JSON (WordPress, Drupal, REST APIs)
• Cache content locally in case of network outage, with graceful rollback error handling
• Support for text transformations like markdown to HTML, image processing, resizing, filtering, and cropping

Getting Launchpad

Launchpad is available on NPM and GitHub:

npm i @bluecadet/launchpad

Check out our documentation to get started and learn more.

We’ve deployed many projects with Launchpad and are actively maintaining it. We also continue to add new features, like our upcoming plugin API.

If you have questions or suggestions, submit an issue and we’ll look into it.