Archive:Wall of Monitors

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Wall of Monitors

Release status: experimental [box doku]

Description many monitors showing many things
Author(s)  Heiko, Severin

I saw this at the London hackspace: A pillar with a bunch of computer displays showing all different sorts of things. So I thought: Let's build one for the lab as well! We have a whole bunch of monitors, let's make them do something cool.

Ideas

One SomefruitPi per Monitor

  • Many Pis on a network
  • Super cheap: OrangePi? [1]
  • Problem: Most are VGA based, Pis only do HDMI
    • HDMI VGA converter? Do they work?

One PC, many graphics cards

  • Old PCI Multihead cards (e.g. nVidia Quadro NVS280)

Mounting

The displays need to be mounted somehow. Ideally, we would just get a ton of display arms. But they are expensive. Maybe we can just build them ourselves?

Software

  • Displays should show a website, or run through multiple websites on sort of a schedule
  • Centrally managed
  • https://github.com/tiefpunkt/signman
  • Currently uses Midori browser, because Chromium is not available on standard Armbian build for the OrangePi One, and Firefox doesn't support kiosk mode out of the box

Hardware

Mounting

  • We have some steel piping we'll mount to the wall
  • Monitors will get a VESA-to-pipe-clamp mount, which attaches to the steel pipe

Setup

  1. Flash SD card with Desktop version of Armbian
  2. Boot up in CLI
    • Login as root, PW 1234
    • Create user "mumalab"
    • Fix resolution to FullHD: h3disp -m 10
    • Update packages
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
    • Install browser
apt-get install midori
    • Prepare mumalab User
su - mumalab 
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tiefpunkt/signman/master/client/signman.sh
chmod 755 signman.sh
crontab -e
> */5 * * * * /home/mumalab/signman.sh
  1. Reboot
    • System will boot into graphical interface

reboot