[Swansea Hackspace] TechHub Digital signage/Info Display System

[Paul Harwood]

Hello Alan, 

Good advice for the power consumption as they would be on most of the time. A motion sensor would have limited value I would guess because most signage is read from such a distance usually (or even behind glass doors). So I will ensure the monitors are low power.

As for security
- physical tampering/removal
- basic hacking protection (ssh keys etc...) Mainly because they will be on the internal network. People might find it fun to mess with them, wont be fun if they break them, or embarrass us with naughty images. Not sure whether they would be externally available so no need for DDoS protection probably, internally we can track DoS.

Ta fo the PICadillo link, looks really good.

Cheers

-- Paul

On 15 Aug 2014, at 13:11, Alan Cox <alan at lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> wrote:

> 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
> 
>