First Purpose-Built Raspberry Pi Digital Signage Players Hit Market

January 31, 2014 by Dave Haynes

Here’s what I think is the first purpose-designed and built Raspberry Pi digital signage player – a unit that UK-based Silver Curve will show off at the big ISE pro-AV show in Amsterdam next week.

It has certainly been possible for a long time now to buy a $45 Raspberry Pi board, buy an enclosure, and the various other bits, and pull together a unit. But this is a unit specifically designed for the task.

Using Silver Curve’s Aperture graphics engine, this little ARM-based gadget can do 1080HD at 60 frames per second and handle 30 layers of animation. It has built-in wifi, RS232, a system clock and 8 GB of storage. There is a stand-alone version and one that will slot into commercial displays that have the Open Pluggable Specification slot.

What’s interesting and I haven’t seen before is the unit has an on-board battery that charges during normal use and then keeps the player operational during power outages for over 30 minutes, before doing a graceful shutdown.

It’s also fanless and ventless.

Dimensions: 227mm x 66mm x 30mm or roughly 9″ by 2.5″ by 1″

Don’t have price, but $300-$400, depending on volume and including the Aperture SW license that kinda turbocharges the graphics performance.  Aperture is not a CMS, but a graphics engine that works with CMS platforms.

Silver Curve will show these at the NEC stand at ISE, and have demos running at the show with Instore Media and Signagelive software.

Nice. Very disruptive times. Patting myself on back for getting Silver Curve founder Bryan Crotaz on my disruptive tech panel at DSE.