Raspberry Pi Digital Signage Platform
Cloud-managed TV screens that boot straight into content, update remotely and survive network failures — built for restaurants, generalizable to any business.
- ~€40
- one-time hardware cost per screen (vs €20–50/month SaaS)
- 30s
- power-on to live content
- <60s
- content update propagation
- 24/7
- unattended operation with auto-recovery
Problemet
Commercial signage solutions cost €20–50 per screen per month, lock content into proprietary CMSs and still fail when the internet drops. Small businesses need screens that just work: plug in power, content appears, prices always current.
Lösningen
A signage stack built on €40 Raspberry Pis: each Pi boots Raspberry Pi OS Lite into a Chromium kiosk session with no keyboard or desktop, loads its assigned screen URL and polls a central API for content. All management happens in a web dashboard — change a price, toggle a night surcharge, and every screen updates within a minute. A watchdog loop relaunches the browser on crash; cached content keeps screens alive through outages.
Arkitektur
- Boot chain: auto-login → startx → Openbox → Chromium kiosk, ~30 seconds from power to content.
- Per-screen URL parameters (screen ID, branch) let one codebase drive unlimited layouts and locations.
- Content API returns menu/pricing JSON; screens poll every 60 s and diff against cache.
- Display hardening: screen blanking and DPMS disabled, cursor hidden, Chromium crash watchdog with 5 s relaunch.
- Scheduling engine: time-window rules (e.g. night surcharge 22:00–06:00) evaluated client-side from server config.
- Fleet operations: SSH-based remote management; new screens provisioned from a documented setup script.
Nyckelfunktioner
Zero-touch boot
Power on → fullscreen content in ~30 seconds. No keyboard, mouse or manual steps.
Remote content management
All screens follow the central dashboard; updates propagate in under a minute.
Time-based scheduling
Configurable time windows switch pricing and content automatically (e.g. night menus).
Failure resilience
Browser watchdog, cached data on network loss, automatic recovery when connectivity returns.
Multi-screen, multi-site
One platform drives different layouts per TV and per location via URL parameters.
Commodity hardware
Runs on Raspberry Pi 3B+; one Pi 4 can drive two screens via dual HDMI.
Teknikstack
Lärdomar
- Treat screens as cattle, not pets: a documented provisioning script makes replacing a failed Pi a 10-minute job.
- Poll-based sync beats push for signage — it needs no inbound connectivity, no VPN and no static IPs.
- The cheapest reliability wins: a while-loop watchdog around Chromium eliminated 100% of 'black screen' call-outs.