The Raspberry Pi series of single board computers have been popular for digital signage applications since they were introduced over a decade ago. Digital signage includes LCD flat panel displays for menus in restaurants, on-campus information for schools, in-store promotions and a wealth of other uses.
We recently had a conversation with Simon Burgess, the Enterprise Business Manager for Raspberry Pi Ltd. about the future of Raspberry Pi 5 in the digital signage industry.
Since the launch of Raspberry Pi 3B in 2016, our Single Board Computers have become extremely popular as commercial media players for digital signage applications due to their size, reliability, performance, low cost, and low power consumption. Pi 5 continues to offer these same benefits with the added advantage of a significant improvement in speed and graphics performance.
The Raspberry Pi 4, introduced in 2019 had a significant upgrade to its GPU over its predecessors, which is central to digital signage performance. The Raspberry Pi 5, the newest member of the Pi family released last October, had yet another significant upgrade in GPU performance over the Raspberry Pi 4. Specifically, its VideoCore VII architecture is 300 MHz faster than the VideoCore VI found in the Raspberry Pi 4 along with other enhancements.
If the Raspberry Pi 5 has such an improvement in graphics capability, then we should start to see it implemented by the large players in digital signage, correct? Well, eventually, but there are a few caveats to keep in mind. Here are some comments from the forums for some popular digital signage platforms:
“There doesn’t seem to be a H264 hardware decoder any more, so the existing method of decoding [H264] will have to be completely rewritten and probably unified with how HEVC/H265 now works.”
“I don’t expect anything to be usable before next year and there’s a lot of changes required to make the video decoding work on the Pi5 at all.”
“Support on Raspberry Pi 5 is ongoing and it’s not compatible at the moment.“
It seems that many platforms are still adding support for the Raspberry Pi 5. However, if you are in need of an immediate solution for a bare bones implementation of digital signage on the Raspberry Pi 5, then balena has you covered! The balena “browser block” is a Docker image that runs a Chromium browser via X11, optimized for balenaOS and compatible with the Raspberry Pi family including the Pi 5.
Deploy the browser block for Digital Signage on a Raspberry Pi 5
You can simply sign up for a free balenaCloud account, click the deploy button below, and push this browser out to up to 10 devices for free! You’ll have complete remote control over the URL displayed on each of those individual devices via a secure web dashboard no matter where they are located. (As long as they have Internet access!)
Clik here to view.
More instructions for this demo of the browser block are located in its repository.
Clik here to view.
After deploying the browser block demo, you should see the image below on the device’s attached screen:
Clik here to view.
Of course, in this simple, no-cost scenario, you’re limited to manually changing the displayed URL on each screen via the balenaCloud dashboard. With a little bit of custom code, the aforementioned browser block, and a paid balenaCloud account, you could develop your own fairly sophisticated digital signage platform that could be deployed on hundreds of thousands of Raspberry Pis courtesy of balena’s device fleet management features. Taking this scenario a step further, you could utilize the balena API to control a single device or an entire fleet, creating your own white label digital signage platform your customers could subscribe to.
However, not everyone wants or needs to develop their own digital signage platform. There are some very fine ones out there, including ones silently integrating the balena platform to provide remote management features to their customers.
If you are running a digital signage platform and struggle with pushing updates to a massive fleet of devices, safely upgrading your OS remotely, or trying to access or monitor your fleet, drop us a line! Let us worry about your remote device management so you can concentrate on providing the best digital signage product for your customers!
In addition, Burgess added:
“I’m delighted that balena continues to focus on supporting the latest generation of Raspberry Pi products for both signage solutions and devices as part of their enterprise fleet management offering.”
Let us know in the comments if you have deployed our browser block demo or used it as a template to create your own digital signage project. If you have any questions about using the balena platform for your existing digital signage platform, get in touch!
The post Is The Raspberry Pi 5 on balena Your Next Digital Signage Platform? appeared first on balena Blog.