Raspberry Pi Digital Signage

I recently helped out the Dunedin Gasworks Museum with creating their digital signage system using a Raspberry Pi.  The aim was to create a system that was very easy to use and update the content, but at a low cost.

I initially looked into creating a presentation in LibreOffice and auto-playing that – but there were a number of issues with trying to automate a presentation:

• There’s a considerable delay when starting a presentation in LibreOffice whilst it loads.
• The editor window always appears first before the presentation starts, which doesn’t look very good.
• Slide timings mean the presentation advances through slides automatically, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to end the presentation automatically (without clicking the mouse).

In the end it was a lot easier to simply run through files in a folder on a USB stick, and display them (depending on extension – video/image etc). If the slideshow folder is not present on any USB device the system will drop to a login screen (so system changes can be made for example).