[Swansea Hackspace] TechHub Digital signage/Info Display System

[Justin Mitchell]

On Fri, 2014-08-15 at 11:18 +0100, Paul Harwood wrote:
> 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)
> - single board computers with wifi 
> - webservers running from some kind of central system that can be updated

If its for TV sized displays, then off the top of my head I would
suggest an RPi (or similar cheap computer) in a VESA mount box connected
to the HDMI and USB ports on the back of each screen.

On the RPi run a minimal install, with a full-screen web browser running
in kiosk mode, pulling web pages from a unique directory on the central
web server.

You can then write whatever complexity of setup you like on the central
server.  you can even start with just static html files dropped into
each of the directories, and build up to whatever kind of complex
management setup you care to spend the time and effort to develop.

Minimal effort to setup the individual screens, mostly just
configuration and installing a few browser plugins.

It scales to any number of screens, as you give each a unique name and
location to pull from.

The displays will show anything you can make a web browser display, in
as fancy a manner as you care to design.  Anything from static html
pages with a javascript page reload, to complex animated html5, or
videos.