Setup Raspberry Pi 3 with Play Digital Signage

Raspberry Pi Digital Signage

We prepared a Raspberry Pi (Model 3) image to speed up your Play Digital Signage setup. You can also set it up yourself by installing Chromium browser with PlaySignage extension.

What we’ve done:

  • Based on raspbian.
  • Configured firewall to block all incoming requests.
  • Installed Chromium browser.
  • Installed PlaySignage extension.
  • Configured the extension to auto-launch and recover from crashes.

Installation guide:

  1. Download the image from here.
  2. Unpack the zip archive.
  3. Write the rpi_fw.img file to SD card (8GB or larger) using etcher.
  4. Insert SD card to Raspberry and power on.
  5. Once device is booted, it will auto-launch PlaySignage player. Press “Exit” on the top right.
  6. Connect to the Internet.
  7. Make sure correct time zone is set.
  8. The default user is “pi” and password “raspberry“. Move cursor to top to show the top task-bar and launch terminal. Change the default password by issuing command “passwd”.
  9. We may have released an update to the player, so let’s try to update the extension:
    1. Launch Chromium and navigate to chrome://extensions (you can find the bookmark on bookmarks tab as well).
    2. Press the button “Update extensions now”.
    3. If there’s an update, it will be downloaded and installed in next few minutes.
    4. You don’t need to do this every time we publish an update, just it may take up to 8 hours for Chromium to update extensions automatically, we just sped up the process.
  10. Close chromium and launch the player app from desktop shortcut.

Limitations

Raspberry is likely the cheapest option to run our players on an open-source software. However, being a low-end device, it has certain drawbacks:

  • Most slide transition effects lag, so we don’t recommend adding them.
  • Element animations lag, however they are meant for more powerful players to begin with.
  • The SD card is prone to wear out, unlike devices with built-in storage, the SD card has limited write cycles it can perform. We recommend choosing a high class (quality) SD card to minimize the issues down the road.

FAQ

How can I enable ssh?

We’ve disabled SSH access for obvious security reasons when distributing an image that has a default password. If you do want to enable ssh for remote maintenance, here’s how:

  1. execute passwd command to change the password – default password is ‘raspberry‘ and the whole world knows it
  2. Enable port 22 in firewall: sudo ufw allow ssh
  3. Enable SSH service: sudo systemctl enable ssh
  4. Start SSH service: sudo systemctl start ssh