Starting with Digital Signage

FREE FOR A LIMITED TIME (the description of the news ticker and the java RSS proxy and http servers is temporarily disabled, but the materials can be downloaded, to compy with regulations for a free course.)

This course will cover digital signage. Instead of using ready to use subscription based solutions it covers a self hosted simple solution based on web standards and low end hardware.

It starts from defining the need, going over different scenario's. Further it will cover on what architecture to use and which simple options are available to create a simple yet appealing digital signage system. We'll quickly handle the installation of the Raspberry Pi with Java as well.

The next part covers a use case development for a sign on a conference in Paris. It will cover the design of the info screen.

Next we'll continue with development of the screen using plain HTML and CSS. The design also covers a clock widget, a weather widget that retrieves weather info from a free info provider, and a news ticker that shows headlines from an RSS feed from the BBC (but you can use another one if you like), and the development of these widgets is also covered in several lessons.

The subsequent step is the implementation and use of a simple java server that will act as a static web page server and as RSS proxy server to solve the CORS issue for the RSS feed, but you can skip this one and use the compiled version if you like

All sources from the solution are part of the course material: HTML, images and java source code for the server, and a compiled version of the server as well. (If you download them and run them locally you can test the end result in 5 minutes and start from there.)

Finally we'll test the solution and implement it on our target system. For this course that is a Raspberry Pi linked to an old 42" HD TV. We'll set it up the system to start automatically on booting the Pi.

You can see the end result (as a static image) on the course image page.