116,200 Reasons To Not Dismiss Raspberry Pi As A Digital Signage Option
April 5, 2016 by Dave Haynes
Anyone in the digital signage business who shrugs off the interest in low-cost micro PCs and free/freemium software as hobbyists and church IT volunteers, equipped with almost no budget and stubborn natures, should keep these 116,200 things in mind.
116,200 page views, that is.
That’s the number of page views on this site, so far, for a post that I wrote and now update about the various options out there to do digital signage projects using low cost or free CMS software, running on a $35-$45 Raspberry Pi micro PC.
The post is a consistent top fiver on Sixteen:Nine when I look over the page view analytics.
So … if you dismiss the interest in low cost or free solutions as reflecting just a subset of the market, you’re probably right. But be aware it’s a big subset.
There are endless reasons why end-users should be focused on commercial hardware and software, and should understand the real costs of an effective network are creative, content and ops (if you choose the wrong hardware). But for a lot of other reasons, there’s a lot of very simple jobs out there, and operators with skimpy budgets, who want or need to go down the Raspberry Pi path.
It’s naive to think that you can still charge 2k+ for a media player in for a digital signage service level contract…but it goes on to this day. Content is another non-starter. Template solutions have failed miserably for all the obvious reasons if you are a marketing pro. Nobody in the agency space would sign up for a third party solution…
Straight up digital signage has become a commodity without the industry really acknowledging it…
Heres a good reason, SDCard suck no matter what you do with them, even NAND flash becomes faulty but takes much longer. SDcards were never designed to run 24/7 with reads, writes and delete operations(if your content updates frequently this will cause even more wear and tear). They will eventually fail, even the good ones or the contacts with the card will overheat and cause the os to stall (like unplugging a hard drive cable)
Having experience with one of the largest if not largest RP production deployments this is the main problem with it.
Go for an RP deployment if your local to them but remote ones you will have problems.
Stick to devices that has a good built in Flash memory.
Thanks for sharing this. It’s no surprise that a budget-friendly, yet effective platform like Raspberry Pi has such a large following. Many people are capable of creating simple, yet compelling material for display, and that doesn’t necessarily require the most cutting edge platform.