3hacks : Raspberry Pi home made Digital Signage system
I somehow got stuck on the Raspberry Pi platform recently. Having lots of free time on my hands I’ve developed a first version of my own digital signage system. It still requires work but overall its working just fine. It has a simple web interface to manage the pi services and settings. It can work with an external USB flash drive or without it (in the ideal world it would have one tho). I’m using a modified IPE debian distro on it with some of my own changes to accommodate apache and other services (IPE is a read only distro with a switch to be writeable when needed to make changes). With that distro I had only good results. I never had a corrupted SD card (had a system with 91 days uptime). It also could be the fact that I’m using an expensive 5.25V 2A power supply for the Raspberry Pi (avoid using smartphone charges for any serious projects). This particular solution is using a centralized server to fetch the content ! It would be ideal for a workplace where there are 10 screens that need to be managed. I deployed a digital signage solution recently (1 monitor) using Screenly OSE and it works great !! It is a fun project for me. Maybe I should fork this project and create a web based system to manage a Pi on its own. Most of the features needed for that are already coded….
