Raspberry Pi used for a message board..

Digital signage is one application the Pi is certainly very well suited for, yes.

Would the Pi + Advanced Bundle with Media Center do the trick?

That very much depends on your requirements and your budget. :-)

You could get away with a Pi, Flatscreen TV and ethernet cable/wi-fi dongle and nothing else depending on what you want to do.

With just that would you just basically get text on the screen?

Also, can you post a link to the bundle you referred to? I don't see it on the Farnell site.

If we can see the components you are proposing to buy we can help you better.

> With just that would you just basically get text on the screen?

Nope, you'll get the full HDMI graphics experience. :-)

Let us know more about what you want to do and how you much time and experience you have with setting up a linux system. I'll tailor my suggestions to that.

Here's a list of questions for you:

- Where will this display be sited?

- What kind information do you want to display?

- Is the information to change frequently or infrequently?

- If frequently, does it need to change automatically?

- If frequent and/or automatic, Is there Wi-Fi or wired ethernet available at the proposed site?

I'll add more as I think of them.

Looking at displaying something like a Power Point presentation.  It would be displayed on a flat panel TV.  Updated weekly.  Not a lot of linux experience.

With a weekly update, you could maybe get away with just updating it by changing the SD card.

The Pi will run Open Office which will display your PowerPoint presentations, though you need to be aware that the rendering is not 100% faithful.

You may need to be patient and learn which PowerPoint techniques work well and which do not.

In that case, you just need a Pi, a TV an SD card and a power supply. A keyboard can be borrowed to set the Pi up, but you don't need one continuously.

You can of course buy a complete accessory bundle, but the above is all you really need. You'll also need a VESA mount if its going up on a wall, but I assume you've got the mechanical side of things under control and we just need to look at the software.

How big are the PowerPoint presos?

With a weekly update, you could maybe get away with just updating it by changing the SD card.

The Pi will run Open Office which will display your PowerPoint presentations, though you need to be aware that the rendering is not 100% faithful.

You may need to be patient and learn which PowerPoint techniques work well and which do not.

In that case, you just need a Pi, a TV an SD card and a power supply. A keyboard can be borrowed to set the Pi up, but you don't need one continuously.

You can of course buy a complete accessory bundle, but the above is all you really need. You'll also need a VESA mount if its going up on a wall, but I assume you've got the mechanical side of things under control and we just need to look at the software.

How big are the PowerPoint presos?

Will pretty much any wireless keyboard work?

Yes, but you'll need a bluetooth dongle if you want to use one and it'll take a bit of setting up.

A wired keyboard will work out of the box.

Cool..  Wired it will be to get started!

Darrell, I notice you are based in the USA, be aware that the Raspbian OS ships with a UK keyboard layout by default.

It's not so hard to reconfigure it. If I recall correctly, on first boot you go automatically into a setup wizard and I believe you can set it up in there. Let me know if you have trouble with this.

You'll want to install Open Office, for that you will need internet access temporarily. I recommend you get a Model 'B' Raspberry Pi. They're 10 bucks more, but they're a lot easier to connect to the rest of the world. You can then get online by connecting an ethernet cable from the Pi to a router or ethernet socket in the wall or whetever you have. You can use a Wi-Fi dongle instead, but like bluetooth, this takes just a little bit more setting up.

You can get much fancier later if you want, for example it's quite easy to set it up so that you can update the PowerPoint presentation wirelessly by sending it from another computer.

You didn't say how big your slideshows were going to be. A rough size range would allow me to make some further suggestions about how best to get your presentations onto the Pi and update them.

Finally, I would think a 4GB SD card will most likely be large enough for your needs, but 8GB are hardly more expensive and will be highly unlikely to ever need to be upsized given your intended usage.

Thanks for the information.  It has been ordered.  I will get back with you next week when I get it.  I'm sure I will have more questions then.

Darrell,

Being curious, I took a few minutes to try out Open Office on my Pi here.

It is quite useable. I loaded one of my work presentations (a pptx file). Open office loaded it fine. There are a few font differences, but considering this is taking a preso straight from Windows to Linux its pretty good. In a few minutes I had a looping presentation going on an HDMI monitor.

I think this will serve your needs just fine.

Talk to you next week when you have a Pi on your desk.

BTW, the Pi is so small it is possible to screw it to the back of the TV, and some people have even powered their Pi from a USB socket on the TV, meaning the only trailing cable you will need to deal with is power for the TV.

best,

Derek

I finally have everything...  Any good instruction out of the box?

Sorry for the slow response, notifications from the E14 site seem to be broken for me, so I had no idea you had posted this.

Not sure what you mean by instructions or out of the box. :-)

Do you mean getting started from scratch with the Pi?

If so, yes there are numerous getting started articles and sites. Just Google "Raspberry Pi Getting Started", that is what I would do. ;-)

best,

Derek