{"id":331,"date":"2021-04-11T10:02:26","date_gmt":"2021-04-11T09:02:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mrpaulclarke.co.uk\/?p=331"},"modified":"2021-04-11T10:04:14","modified_gmt":"2021-04-11T09:04:14","slug":"information-displays","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mrpaulclarke.co.uk\/?p=331","title":{"rendered":"Information Displays"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One project that I was involved with a little while ago was to provide information displays around a school. These were going to be known as Pupil Information Points &#8211; or PIPs.<\/p>\n<p>It was around the time the original Raspberry PI&#8217;s were being released and so I looked at how we could utilise these ultra compact devices to make the displays.<\/p>\n<p>We decided to turn the PI into a web kiosk and would configure it to display content from a central webserver. This was because all of the digital signage software was either expensive, or cumbersome. This had to be a simple solution that could be updated on the fly without any need to visit each display.<\/p>\n<p>This was the process used:<\/p>\n<p><strong>Configure Raspberry Pi<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Configure Networking<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Set gateway to your proxy server \/ gateway address<\/li>\n<li>Set DNS to your internal DNS servers<\/li>\n<li>Set DNS search to your domain name<\/li>\n<li>Enable SSH<\/li>\n<li>Set Password<\/li>\n<li>Set Pi Name<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Install VLC<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>$sudo apt-get update<\/li>\n<li>$sudo apt-get install vlc<\/li>\n<li>$sudo apt-get upgrade<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Disable screen sleep &#8212; so the screen stays on<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>$ sudo nano \/etc\/lightdm\/lightdm.conf<\/li>\n<li># add the following lines to the [SeatDefaults] section<\/li>\n<li># don&#8217;t sleep the screen<\/li>\n<li>xserver-command=X -s 0 dpms<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Hide cursor on inactivity<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>$ sudo apt-get install unclutter<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Configure LXDE to start the Midori browser on login<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>$ sudo nano \/etc\/xdg\/lxsession\/LXDE\/autostart<\/li>\n<li>$ sudo nano ~\/.config\/lxsession\/LXDE-pi\/autodstart on Raspian Jessie or Stretch<\/li>\n<li># comment everything and add the following lines<\/li>\n<li>@xset s off<\/li>\n<li>@xset -dpms<\/li>\n<li>@xset s noblank<\/li>\n<li>@amixer sset PCM,0 90%<\/li>\n<li># if you want to play your own radio station (shoutcast) then you can add the following @cvlc &lt;your shoutcast address&gt;:8000\/radio.m3u<\/li>\n<li>@sed -i &#8216;s\/&#8221;exited_cleanly&#8221;: false\/&#8221;exited_cleanly&#8221;: true\/&#8217; ~\/.config\/chromium $ #This prevents chrome from displaying error messages when it restarts<\/li>\n<li>@chromium-browser &#8211;noerrdialogs &#8211;kiosk &lt;your webserver address&gt;\u00a0 &#8211;incognito &#8211;d$<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Configure Overscan<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>$sudo nano \/boot\/config.txt<\/li>\n<li>uncomment bottom line under noobs<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Now that the PI was configured, we just needed to set up a webserver. Luckily we had a NAS that also acted as a webserver. We pointed our PI&#8217;s to the NAS and created a website. We set the dimensions of the website to 1920&#215;1080, the reason was because we attached the PI&#8217;s to FULL HD monitors using HDMI, this enabled us to also stream audio to the devices.<\/p>\n<p>The website was VERY simple, it was a gallery of PowerPoint slides saved as JPGS. So when the PowerPoint was amended, we simply saved it as JPGs, changed the website using our Web Software (Website X5) and re-uploaded to the NAS.<\/p>\n<p>We also put in a special code on the site to automatically reload the site every 15 minutes. This saved us going round to each display and manually refreshing the pages.<\/p>\n<p>It was very simple, and very effective. Each display cost less than \u00a3150<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One project that I was involved with a little while ago was to provide information displays around a school. These were going to be known as Pupil Information Points &#8211; or PIPs. It was around the time the original Raspberry PI&#8217;s were being released and so I looked at how we could utilise these ultra&hellip; <br \/> <a class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.mrpaulclarke.co.uk\/?p=331\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":332,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-331","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-services"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mrpaulclarke.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mrpaulclarke.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mrpaulclarke.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrpaulclarke.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrpaulclarke.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=331"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrpaulclarke.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":333,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrpaulclarke.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331\/revisions\/333"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrpaulclarke.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/332"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mrpaulclarke.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrpaulclarke.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrpaulclarke.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}