 Raspberry Pi signage. This is actually a really clever solution for creating a sign server, like menu servers that you may see in restaurants or display boards like you've seen me at like a mall kiosk, or even one of our clients who is using this to display safety messages and other company announcements across 30 locations across the US. And they just managed all in this Pi signage dashboard. They pushed it out to a series of raspberry pies. And we'll talk about this product because I've had a lot of people ask me about sign solutions. And we've worked with this one a couple times now and I really like it. So let's talk a little bit about Pi signage specifically and what you need for it. So first Raspberry Pi. That's the first minimum requirement of it. Then you need the Pi signage sign up, which is a free sign up and you get two free licenses. Now the product is open source. You can run your own server. You can manage it all yourself and do everything yourself. What they're charging you for when I say licenses is the software hosting side of it. So if you need to spin it up and do all of it yourself and run all your own servers without any licensing, you can. But they have a fee like $35 a year is what it's at at June 2019. And that will allow you to get this up and running for a pretty minimal fee. Now it's not that expensive compared to a lot of the other science solutions I've seen. And like I said, the product itself is open source. I want to get that out of the way first. It will work for free as long as you're doing all the hosting on the system. Just getting that out of the way. Back to Pi signage itself. And let's talk about some of the details. So they're a little marketing blurb is Pi signage is an HD video capable digital signage player based on a standard off the shelf components, that being a Raspberry Pi. And it connects to TV via HDMI is powered by a standard USB source. And I'm actually powering it via the Raspberry Pi supplied power connector I bought as the kit. It is based on the Raspberry Pi Model B B plus and Pi two, also Pi three, they don't have Pi four, which just was announced listed in here, but I'm sure it should work on a Pi four as well. And I'll leave links below where you can get all the parts you need for this. But like I said, it's basically a Raspberry Pi and an SD card. Now, there are two ways you can get the Pi signage software. Here's the PDF guide where they have a lot of information and details. Then here's the link for G drive as in Google Drive is just an image file that you download and flash to it. And they have more documentation how to do it a couple different ways. So it's pretty, pretty straightforward of getting it out of the box and set up download the image flash the image there. Done. They have actually a lot of documentation in here as well. This whole project has great documentation, which is wonderful. Now, the next thing you're going to know is once you boot this thing up. This is what you'll see. You see the player ID and the IP address that the player has assigned to it. Now the way the player got the address is with a network cable plugged in. So it's got the HDMI power and network plugged in here. Probably wondering why don't want to run a network cable to every TV location I want to display. Not a problem. That's where once you see the IP address of the 172 1669 192, we're going to go there now and show you how you can set this up and put it on your Wi-Fi. So here it is when you go on there and it's port 8000. The username is pie password pie. And you can see where it's set to DHCP. We can put a static IP in and here's the Wi-Fi setting so we can scan network. It can find a network and put the password in save and we'll see if it connects to the Wi-Fi and the pie reboots and tries with the network settings. Alright, so now the pie is connected after a reboot to the Wi-Fi. So no more cable plugged in. The only thing we got plugged in now is HDMI and power. So that's great. And then we're going to go here and log into it on its new IP address that it was assigned. Whoops, P I P I sign it. So it's how you get it connected to Wi-Fi pretty straightforward. You can actually and I didn't demo this but you can plug a keyboard into Raspberry Pi and program it that way too. So it's another option. I like programming it this way. It seems pretty easy. The only thing I changed from default here is I did set the player to be at 1080. That is what I prefer to have the resolution be but it does support 720 as well. In case you're hooking up something like that. Now, if you go to the user settings, you can change the password but I don't recommend changing that here because you do that and manage all that through the central dashboard. So now that we have our networking taken care of and this actually because I had it plugged in via network cable, it already came up to the player ID but you notice it's green. It says server Pi signage connected. So there's not any networking that you have to do. There's no firewalls to map. This reaches out to the Pi signage server. As I mentioned, if you wanted it to go out to a different server because you wanted to do all your own hosting, you can change that in here. Like I said, for the sake of this video, we're going to do everything on the Pi signage server. But now that we have the player ID, we know it's attached to it. We're just going to go ahead and put this 16 digit player ID in here. We'll call it the Pi player. And it's studio is location hit register. And it's yellow for essentially like it's provisioning it. It takes a second to think and away it goes. But we're going to change things on it from here now if we wanted to changing. So it's default group, we can put it in the studio Chromecast group and it will get that group right there or the default group that I have set up. And we're actually going to leave this one in default. So I don't have to change the playlist anybody's can take a second and it will update the player and it will start playing based on that after we hit deploy. So you have your groups here. I have the default group and studio Chromecast group. You have the assets where you assign each of the assets to the different playlists. Then you have the playlists themselves. And then the playlist get assigned to the different groups. So here is the launch system studio playlist. And I have that actually assigned inside of here. So we look at default group default playlist launch system studio and then we can hit deploy put them both here and hit deploy. And that's going to push the settings out. And that's actually a kind of a nice feature. So if you're editing the playlist, you're not messing with things in real time. You do have to go back to the group and deploy once you update or change a playlist. Now the pie is actually downloading a playlist and getting ready to pull that data down. So let's go over here and see what's in the playlist. Now I've got a couple different templates and you can actually preview how this is going to be looking on there. It's got a little preview window that's going to pop up and it's slowly loading it. So there we go. This preview is actually trying to render it as it's going to look on the pie, which is kind of cool. And then I can force it to go to the next slide. It's got a 10 second countdown timer. So I can say, OK, preview what it looks like. But let's see what it actually looks like by switching to it. So here we are back at the Raspberry Pi and you can see it's going through and running through the slides that we have assigned to it. And I even assigned a video in this as well. And what this does is it's not pulling these online each time. It downloads and caches each one of these assets that you put to it to the pie itself. And it does play and I just grabbed a quick video of me being stupid on a motorcycle. And this is showing you that it will play full 1080 video downloaded to it without a problem that we have in the assets list. This is over at the cruise the other day. A couple other details about the settings on this. So here is the default playlist on here. We're going to go in here and settings. I know I changed it to 1080 because I wanted this at 1080. That's actually because my capture card, if you change resolutions, has a headache. So it's why I had to make sure it was set that way. But without being at the location, you can, when you build these groups, you can build the default settings. How you want the animations to work, like slide left, slide right. Matter of fact, we're going to change these. We're going to have them slide in. Actually, yeah, slide seems fine. Background color, show a logo, show the clock. Hey, let's show the time on the screen. So we'll do that. And you can do some small adjustments like volume adjustments, video break. So if you want to pause things in between, you can schedule power on and off of the TV. And a couple other details that are inside of here. They also have like a couple offset options in here. So we're going to have it. Okay. Now, anytime we do a change like this, we go ahead and hit deploy again, deploy. And that just pushes the settings back down to the players. And away you go. So we'll give this a second to deploy. And one of the things I'll comment here is I do have the Chromecast setup. And that's actually that's running behind me is the Chromecast. Now it's kind of novel. But in it's actually moved my head up here is if you want to connect it to a Chromecast device locally, I think it's kind of neat that they added a scenario. I did some testing with it. It's like that's running behind me. It does work. I like the extra features you get with the Raspberry Pi and the fact that once these pies are deployed, it doesn't require a local computer to try to connect to one of the Chromecast devices to get them going and get them started. Plus with Google's ecosystem, if Google makes changes to it, these changes then have to be made over here, et cetera, et cetera. Raspberry Pi, I think is a much more solid option for this. But it does have the option to work with the Chromecast or even the Chrome browser. So now that this is deployed and we go back over here to the players and we'll look at the Pi player again. And it was just synced. All right, cool. Let's go back and look at it. And we have the time down at the bottom. So we can see that it's currently 144 p.m. on there. And this is like some of the features you can add when you go through these. You can add also tickers. You can add information. You can even add a website to this. So to add new things, we go over here to our assets. First, we have to add as an asset. We want to add a link, add a message, create a notice. I like the idea of creating a notice. You know, yo, this is a notice. We'll go ahead and save and preview. There we go. Great. That's one of the things in there. Yo 30502 HTML. All right, let's find a site to add. So let's add a link for dark sky. I've never tried this on here. But this is kind of novel because they got live streaming, audio streaming, web link embedded web page opens a new browser. It shows an iFrame media message or local folder or file. So it's got a couple different options here. So let's try and put dark sky in here and see if this works as an asset. All right. Now we go over here to playlists, Lawrence System Studios. And here's those other assets like the dark sky one. We'll take off Tom's stupid motorcycle video. We'll add dark sky and the yo message. And we'll take out a couple of these. We don't need that much stuff in here. Now it's kind of novel. You don't have to click save. I was kept looking for the save button. It's all, you know, nice modern UI deploy. So we want to push this to the default group here. Deploy. Now the request has been sent to our players. It takes a minute. I actually noticed the pet pie sort of blinking. So it's downloading pretty quick on here. And now the weather is part of the slides in here. So it's rendering it. And this is kind of neat because you can do these different live feeds inside of here. And when you're doing the live feeds, gives you that option to, you know, choose different things. Yo, this is a notice. Still has a time on there. So you can create a page even. And I have a client that working on this project where they created a specific page. And then they just update the information on that page. It can even be like a WordPress page. And as they update that specific page, that page gets pulled as one of the slides on there. So instead of even having to log into the pie manager, it can pull information, especially if you have a page is actively updated, maybe a score page or anything. These are really dynamic solutions and offer a lot of features on here. The menu and everything on here is very extensive. The way you can manage all the assets, everything from uploading video to dynamic web pages, you can even set some rolling tickers. That's the last thing I think we'll do is a rolling ticker on the bottom. So we'll get back over the playlist and we'll set ticker, enable, add message and wow, we can even do an RSS feed. So we'll actually do a medium, maybe full speed ticker. So here's some text. This is the ticker notice more to come later. Save. So that is now a ticker related to this playlist. And we're going to go ahead and deploy it. Deploy and done. Now one more asset we'll add while I'm waiting for that to deploy is we can add. We just assign this basically a YouTube test, live sharing YouTube, drop in a YouTube link, save. We'll have that one to deploy it as well. So we added as an asset over to the playlist. Back to deploy. And now we can see it's rendering the video or rendering the ticker on the bottom and still pulling through the web pages. And if the deployment is ready, it should start playing the YouTube video after this. Oh, we got the yo notice that actually I think is in order before that. And now it's playing the YouTube video we listed in here. It plays YouTube quite well. I thought this was kind of neat that you can list videos in there as one of the options. So you can just build your own little playlist of YouTube videos and they will just roll along on the Raspberry Pi going to the next one going to the next one, etc, etc. I'm excited because if you notice the rendering is a little bit slow on the Raspberry Pi 3 that this one here is, but the Raspberry Pi 4 should be just a little bit faster. I have not tested this because it was just released with the Raspberry Pi 4. I'm pretty sure it works. If it doesn't work, I'm sure they'll have an update for it soon. But it does clearly work on Raspberry Pi 3s, which you may be able to get a discount on now that they're becoming so popular. But that's it for Pi signage. It's a really simple sign tool. I really like it. Not being locked into some weird proprietary ecosystem. The menus on it are kind of overwhelming at first, but they give you a lot of flexibility. It does have a lot of options. But the out of the box, if you just use default default on everything, it works pretty well to get you started. But this does scale very well. This allows you to manage, you know, even hundreds of these things deployed. You can even group them into different client groupings, different playlist groups, etc., etc. So you get a lot of granular control. And for doing signage at like a restaurant or menu or any type of display board advertising, this is an easy little solution. It's relatively inexpensive. And even with the fees, if you don't decide to spin up your own server, you want to have them host everything, it's not too bad, not not too expensive to do. And I like the way it just puts the ID number on the screen when you boot it up. Now, something interesting about that when this is registered to a Pi signage server and goes to a Pi signage account, that is right now where I've got it tied to. Once you do this, and you reflash the card, it always grabs the settings again. So if the Raspberry Pi, this card goes bad, and I have to put another one in, it grabs the same settings, I believe it's generating it probably off some ID inside of here, maybe even the MAC addresses that it has. But the ID stays the same even if you change the card. As I'd actually popped this was at a different customer as a demo, they sent it back to us, and I just reflashed the card thinking, okay, I'll reflash it and adopt it again. Turns out I went right back to their account automatically. I didn't have to do anything. I grabbed the settings. So I had to actually go into their account, remove it. So it was free again to be adopted to another account. And because these work in cache, the video that they're playing, even if there's an outage and online outage, they'll keep playing the last playlist given. But of course, if they're not online, any of the web page links won't render. But that's it. I'll leave links below where you can check this out. And I'll have a kit below where you can order an Amazon, a quick little Raspberry Pi kit, like I said, pretty inexpensive to get this with one of our Amazon affiliate links, and it helps out the channel. So I do appreciate it. Alright, thanks. Thanks for watching. If you liked this video, give it a thumbs up. If you want to subscribe to this channel to see more content, hit that subscribe button and the bell icon and maybe YouTube will send you a notice when we post. If you want to hire us for a project that you've seen or discussed in this video, head over to LawrenceSystems.com where we offer both business IT services and consulting services and are excited to help you with whatever project you want to throw at us. Also, if you want to carry on the discussion further, head over to Forums.LauranceSystems.com where we can keep the conversation going. And if you want to help the channel out in other ways, we offer affiliate links below, which offer discounts for you and a small cut for us that does help fund this channel. And once again, thanks again for watching this video and see you next time.