[Swansea Hackspace] TechHub Digital signage/Info Display System

[Alan Cox]

On Fri, 15 Aug 2014 11:18:20 +0100
Paul Harwood <paul at harwood-leon.com> wrote:

> Hello!
> 
> We are thinking of creating a digital display/signage system for TechHub which will consist of:
> 
> - Cheap monitors dotted about the building, mounted on walls (lobby area to begin with)

Price your displays carefully for power consumption - there are plenty of
cheap lowish power displays and plenty that are not. If they are on all
the time then the saving can be misleading.

(Although of course with a motion sensor they could light up when there
is someone around)

> - single board computers with wifi 
> - webservers running from some kind of central system that can be updated
> 
> Would the hackspace be interested in helping us build it as a project? It would be useful to display stuff when events are running directing people etc. 
> 
> The rough spec would be:
> - display tenants rooms floors
> - display events
> - lobby, possibly per floor - if the lobby works out
> - system really easy to update with little or no technical skill
> - secure (obviously)

Secure in what sense ? physical removal, protocol hacking,
denial-of-service or what ?


Arduino and friends are pretty good at driving LCD panels with low update
rates, generally of small size. For bigger panels you need LVDS
connectors or VGA/HDMI and similar to external panels/monitors. Arduino
isn't so good for this, but the PI is pretty competent (the CPU was
largely intended for consumer electronics grade video playback so has a
lot of video capability) and the newest version they've fixed quite a few
of the power issues with the original.

For integrated small units you can also get things
like http://www.4dsystems.com.au/product/PICadillo_35T/

and the latest STM32discovery board with onboard 320x240 display is
actually cheaper than a PI (about £15 from Farnell)

Alan