5 ms·

Very. I have 200+ digital signs running on customer sites 24x7 playing videos, images, live feeds and showing web pages without trouble for over three years now

Very. I have 200+ digital signs running on customer sites 24x7 playing videos, images, live feeds and showing web pages without trouble for over three years now.

DerWOK 10y ago
Sounds pretty cool! Some source/how-to you can share?
- camperman 10y ago
  It's pretty boring to be honest, which is probably why it's so reliable. I sync media using rsync, the movie and stream player is omxplayer, the image and news feeds use Lua and Love2D, and the scheduler is a simple algorithm which was written first in LuaJIT, then Python and soon in Go because of speed and concurrency. The players push their status to a central server for monitoring purposes but I'm replacing that with pull and Ansible. The customer interface is web2py and the schedule creator is desktop wxpython running on Linux, the Mac and Windows.
  - leonhandreke 10y ago
    That sounds like a cool side project/business! Would you mind elaborating how you got started this business and how you acquired clients?
    - camperman 10y ago
      An old friend approached me with the idea and we have developed it together. He used to work for a media company which had these sort of clients already so we got a head start when they folded and we stepped in to pick up the slack. Subsequent sales have all been word-of-mouth. Product development has been entirely driven by customers: they need something, I put it in and then every player gets the new functionality once it's battle-tested. When we first looked at the market, we realized that no-one really knew how it worked because it's still very young. So we decided to compete on price and reliability. Instead of lock-in contracts and up-front hardware purchases, we charge a small month-to-month rental and the hardware remains ours.
soylentcola 10y ago
Nothing nearly so impressive here but I recently got my org to buy ~20 RasPi 3s to replace ~20 of these $1500 Cisco DMPs that were EOL and starting to fail. All they were used for was displaying a webpage that showed the schedule for a given room in the building so the Cisco boxes were always overkill (and the browser built into it was terrible to boot). So I put together a test setup on a RasPi that just boots LXDE in kiosk mode, opens Chromium with no...er...chrome on the windows and with no mouse cursor, etc, loads the page for that room, and the page itself handles refreshes. Set a cron job to reboot every morning at 4am in case there was any scheduled maintenance done on the server delivering the webpage overnight. Can SSH in to change things and also set up a node.js script I found that allows me to open a URL in my browser and trigger a reboot or shutdown. All of this was new to me but in the end, I replaced twenty $1500 boxes with twenty $55 kits and it was an excuse to learn/brush up on some things. The best part is that they look even better now because the Cisco boxes could only go up to 1366x768 and now the displays are running at native resolution. The down side is that this isn't a private company (state university) so I don't get any sort of bonus for saving them almost $30k :(
- camperman 10y ago
  I disagree - that is impressive. Document it thoroughly and put it on the CV. Current and future employers love it when someone can take practical steps to save money while improving functionality.
- phil21 10y ago
  > The down side is that this isn't a private company (state university) so I don't get any sort of bonus for saving them almost $30k :( If you expect this in the private world, you are going to have a very bad time :)

Very. I have 200+ digital signs running on customer sites 24x7 playing videos, images, live feeds and showing web pages without trouble for over three years now.

DerWOK 10y ago

Sounds pretty cool! Some source/how-to you can share?

camperman 10y ago
It's pretty boring to be honest, which is probably why it's so reliable. I sync media using rsync, the movie and stream player is omxplayer, the image and news feeds use Lua and Love2D, and the scheduler is a simple algorithm which was written first in LuaJIT, then Python and soon in Go because of speed and concurrency. The players push their status to a central server for monitoring purposes but I'm replacing that with pull and Ansible. The customer interface is web2py and the schedule creator is desktop wxpython running on Linux, the Mac and Windows.
- leonhandreke 10y ago
  That sounds like a cool side project/business! Would you mind elaborating how you got started this business and how you acquired clients?
  - camperman 10y ago
    An old friend approached me with the idea and we have developed it together. He used to work for a media company which had these sort of clients already so we got a head start when they folded and we stepped in to pick up the slack. Subsequent sales have all been word-of-mouth. Product development has been entirely driven by customers: they need something, I put it in and then every player gets the new functionality once it's battle-tested. When we first looked at the market, we realized that no-one really knew how it worked because it's still very young. So we decided to compete on price and reliability. Instead of lock-in contracts and up-front hardware purchases, we charge a small month-to-month rental and the hardware remains ours.

soylentcola 10y ago

Nothing nearly so impressive here but I recently got my org to buy ~20 RasPi 3s to replace ~20 of these $1500 Cisco DMPs that were EOL and starting to fail. All they were used for was displaying a webpage that showed the schedule for a given room in the building so the Cisco boxes were always overkill (and the browser built into it was terrible to boot). So I put together a test setup on a RasPi that just boots LXDE in kiosk mode, opens Chromium with no...er...chrome on the windows and with no mouse cursor, etc, loads the page for that room, and the page itself handles refreshes. Set a cron job to reboot every morning at 4am in case there was any scheduled maintenance done on the server delivering the webpage overnight. Can SSH in to change things and also set up a node.js script I found that allows me to open a URL in my browser and trigger a reboot or shutdown. All of this was new to me but in the end, I replaced twenty $1500 boxes with twenty $55 kits and it was an excuse to learn/brush up on some things. The best part is that they look even better now because the Cisco boxes could only go up to 1366x768 and now the displays are running at native resolution. The down side is that this isn't a private company (state university) so I don't get any sort of bonus for saving them almost $30k :(

camperman 10y ago
I disagree - that is impressive. Document it thoroughly and put it on the CV. Current and future employers love it when someone can take practical steps to save money while improving functionality.
phil21 10y ago
> The down side is that this isn't a private company (state university) so I don't get any sort of bonus for saving them almost $30k :( If you expect this in the private world, you are going to have a very bad time :)