Π PiSign - Digital Signage for the Raspberry Pi

PiSign is a fork of Wireload's successful Screenly project.

The current version, located in the development branch, should be consider a beta. It's currently in 'production' use to serve content on displays in an office environment, but there's a still a few kinks to work out.

There are many use cases where PiSign can be used, such as:

• Display BI or server dashboards
• Advertisements (in-store or in store-front)
• Internal information boards
• Fancy photo-frame

A rought video of Screenly in action is available here.

Screenshots and pictures of Screenly are available here.

A number of modifications have been made, or are in the pipeline, since the fork from Screenly. These include:

• Proper scheduling of assets
• A few UI tweaks and updates
• A Shutdown schedule to ensure that the Pi and OS is safely switched off when a display is also scheduled to turn off.

How Pi Sign works

Once installed, Pi Sign can view images, videos and websites on the screen. You can configure your own playlist, and set the duration for how long each element should be viewed.

Here's how you add content to your PiSign:

• Point your browser to the URL displayed on the screen at boot.
• Click 'Add Asset'
  • Provide a name of the asset
  • For content available online enter the URL to the asset
  • You can also upload content (recommended for photos and videos) by clicking on the 'Upload' tab.
  • Click 'Submit.'
• On the newly created Asset click 'Schedule'
  • Click 'Add Schedule'
  • Schedules can be created for a single use, or can be used to create schedules that reoccur daily, or weekly.
• Once you've added your schedules for the asset, return to the PiSign home page - click the PiSign logo at the top left of your browser window.
• Toggle your new asset to 'On'.
• Repeat for all the assets you want to display.

Requirements

• A Raspberry Pi 2 (it may work on a first generation model B, but I've not tested it).
• An SD Card (>4GB).
• A HDMI-cable.
• A network connection (with DHCP).
• A Keyboard and mouse (only required for the installation).
• A monitor/TV that can view full HD (and has HDMI input).

Configure the Raspberry Pi

• Flash the SD card and install Raspbian. Instructions are available here.
• On first use the Raspi-Config utility to:
  • Log in to the Desktop
  • Expand the file system
  • Enable SSH Access
  • Adjust the Overscan settings if needed for your display
• Make sure that the system's clock is configured for the proper timezone.

Please note that PiSign currently relies on the user 'pi', so don't change the username.

Install PiSign

For the current (Development) version open a terminal-window (or SSH-session) and as the user 'pi' run:

curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jameskirsop/pi-sign/development/misc/install.sh | bash

Assuming everything went well, reboot your system. PiSign should now load.

Upon boot, PiSign's URL should show up on the screen (e.g. http://aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd:8080).

Supported media

Pi Sign currently three types of media:

• Videos
  • Screenly uses omxplayer as the video back-end. It is currently limited to MP4/h264-encoded videos.
• Images
• Web-pages

Adobe Flash-media is not supported.

Images and web-pages will be rendered to fill the display constraints - likely to be 1920x1080 on a modern display, so adjust your content to have the appropriate proportions/dimensions for your target display. You're able to get the pixel dimensions and aspect ratio of the display attached to your Raspberry Pi by clicking on the 'System Info' button at the top of each page.

It is also worth noting that no web media is permanently stored on the Raspberry Pi. All content is simply retrieved from the remote server (with limited caching in the browser). If you require offline media access, make sure you use the 'Upload' feature mentioned above.

Upgrade PiSign

Since PiSign still is in beta (and you've probably used the instructions above), it's not unlikely that you'll run across bugs.

To upgrade PiSign, simply run (as the user 'pi'):

cd ~/pisign
git pull

Licensing

Dual License: GPLv2 and Commercial License. For more information, contact WireLoad.