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SAPO DIGITAL SIGNAGE CLIENT

UPDATE (FEB 27 2013):

The client is now fully working in standalone mode, including video playback (full or timed)

Anyone who checks out the code can get it running out of the box on their local machine.

Work is ongoing to finish refactoring and publishing the server side (it needs a lot more cleanup than the client).

IMPORTANT NOTE

This repository currently contains sources for the client only. The server code will follow in a separate repository.

This is being released as-is mostly to enable people to learn from it and use the client in standalone mode.

SETTING UP FOR TESTING AND DEVELOPMENT

  • Clone the repo (no surprises here)

  • Copy data/config.json.dist to data/config.json, making any required changes

  • Run it:

      python app.py

  • Go to http://localhost:8000 - or, if you've enabled debugging, http://localhost:8000/debug to see a list of all active local URLs

STUFF YOU SHOULD BE AWARE OF

This code was developed internally at SAPO for running the Codebits 2012 signage atop Raspberry Pi devices, and quickly evolved from a guerrilla solution into a full-blown client-server app.

This is going to be version 2.0 - version 1.0 is being used internally at SAPO since October 2012 and will be replaced by this (and a few custom add-ons) once it's finished.

Here's a brief summary of the requirements and their impact on solution design:

  • clients are not supposed to store any content locally, except a handful of templates to render baseline content. The idea here is that you'll be running this against a set of web services or a full web server that will render pages to the devices.

  • clients therefore run "playlists", i.e. JSON files listing URLs to render locally. Playlists can contain URLs to HTML content of various descriptions or to video files, and support time intervals and simple "random" groups.

  • the server can push new content to the client in near-realtime (depending on content type), including whole new playlists.

  • communication between client and server was downgraded from websockets to an HTTP(S) polling mechanism to better cope with firewalls, NAT, timeouts, etc.

  • accordingly, the client runs its own HTTP server to allow for disconnected operation (if the central server goes down, we'll always be able to display something, and cache some information in the meantime)

  • we had no idea what displays would be available, so we settled on 1280x720 as default and 1024x768 as a fallback. 1920x1080 is possible, but you'll be stretching the hardware to the limits when rendering HTML locally so it's not advisable (plus most people can't tell the difference when you're projecting or viewing from afar).

  • resolution is explicitely set on views to make it easier to size and position both HTML and SVG elements (the Codebits layouts were extensively based on inline SVG, with some dimensions computed inside views).

  • since we had to deal with both X and omxplayer, resolution is assumed to be set in /boot/config.txt as well as using fbset (and even then we make sure uzbl is launched with the geometry option to clip the rendering surface)

INSTALLATION

The following steps assume you're deploying on the Raspberry Pi as the pi user and starting from a clean Raspbian install.

  • Bring your image up to date and install required packages:

      sudo apt-get update
  sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
  sudo apt-get install uzbl unclutter ttf-mscorefonts-installer vim tmux \
  x11-xserver-utils git-core ntpdate ack-grep denyhosts omxplayer \
  watchdog chkconfig

  • Edit /boot/config.txt to set the framebuffer to 1280x720

This will undo any automatic detection done during the boot process and start X with our own custom session (see the install directory for the startup scrips).

In stock Raspbian, it will also make it harder for someone to log in at the console (but is not a proper "fix" for that - it's just simpler than tweaking lxsession and whatnot).

  • Clone the repo (no surprises here):

      cd 
  git clone https://github.com/sapo/digital-signage-client.git
  cd digital-signage-client

  • Copy data/config.json.dist to data/config.json, making any required changes

  • run install/deploy.sh to setup the configuration files

  • OPTIONAL: change sshd to run on another port (even with denyhosts, it makes sense for some deployments) or block port 22 access from everywhere but the address(es) you'll be managing these from.

  • RECOMMENDED: change the password for the pi user.

  • RECOMMENDED: Disable sshd password authentication and add your public key to /home/pi/.ssh/authorized_keys.

  • RECOMMENDED: use Hexxeh's rpi-update to upgrade to the latest firmware and kernel (this is a sad necessity since Raspbian broke omxplayer by not shipping the latest firmware...)

  • RECOMMENDED: enable the Raspberry Pi's hardware watchdog so that it will automatically reset the board upon freezing:

      sudo modprobe bcm2708_wdog
  sudo sh -c "echo 'bcm2708_wdog' >> /etc/modules"
  sudo apt-get install watchdog chkconfig
  sudo chkconfig watchdog on
  sudo /etc/init.d/watchdog start
  sudo sh -c "echo 'watchdog-device = /dev/watchdog' >> /etc/watchdog.conf"

  • Edit /etc/rc.local to include these lines before the final command:

      fbset --xres 1280 --yres 720
  sudo -u pi startx

  • reboot

ON LOGGING

Note that the app has built-in support for diagnostics logging (which is kept in RAM and can be sent back to the server if so desired). This is set up as the ram logger in config.json.dist.

This can be very helpful in debugging the system remotely, but will not capture tracebacks as is (pull requests towards contributing that functionality are welcome).

FURTHER READING

The original blog post, wherein you'll find some screenshots of the server.

A few photos of this in action: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

LICENSING

SAPO has a strong Open-Source culture and believes in placing credit where credit is due.

  • This entire codebase is MIT licensed, and therefore free to use as you please for commercial or non-commercial purposes.
  • Sample GIF images are CC Licensed from Wikimedia Commons.
  • The Roboto Font is bundled as a convenience (and because it's eminently suited to digital signage) under the Apache License.
  • The SAPO logo is a registered trademark of Portugal Telecom. It is included as a default part of this software's branding screen and cannot be reused for any other purpose.

As common courtesy, we ask you to preserve (and contribute to) source code comments, attributions and this README if you decide to fork, deploy or otherwise redistribute this software.