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By beekerstudios on
Recipe for Drupal CMS Digital Billboard system
Hardware:
Apple Mac Mini
Sony 52" LCD 1080p Display
Software:
Drupal 6
Custom Flash Drupal Interface to output XML
Flash (ActionScripting, Tweenlite, Fuse Kit)
Shell Scripting and Cron Jobs
Capabilities:
- Time on screen determined by CCK Field
- Re-order playlist determined by CCK Field
- Still Image Display (file attach)
- Canned Animated text (cck field) with image (file attach) template
- 1080p Video (flv, mov, mp4)
- News Ticker overlay (can be turned off or on, on a per playlist item basis).
- Current weather conditions downloaded from Yahoo's Weather API
- Current playlist status (last reload, currently playing, etc.)
... in other words it's a more capable slideshow flash App that uses XML to read what it should do which is output from Drupal.
Why Drupal? Why re-invent an almost perfectly extensible wheel? I know PHP, well, but not perfectly, but Drupal is rock solid, and I know how to pull the information out of it that I need. The front-end is user friendly enough for a copy writer to make changes on.
Why Flash? Another one of those, I know it well, but would have preferred a more robust and capable API, but I am no programmer, but something like quartz, or core animation, and core video would have probably been a more robust solution. Something I would like to work towards, but it's outside of my capabilities right now.
Drawbacks? HD 1080p video in flash on OS X isn't exactly smooth as butter, but I am working on making it look and work better, but it's except-able and it's looks fantastic. Other than that, Drupal doesn't prevent me from doing anything I can't dream up.
Unfortunately I can't let the cat out of the bag, because this system needs to be somewhat closed, the CMS is behind a firewall, and the display is as well, and will be. But here are some screenshots, and I may put up a video of me doing a realtime update or something.
Comments
Clever
I like it!
It's better than PowerPoint....
by a long shot and sure is a lot more dynamic. I am glad you like it. Video will be forthcoming once they install this beast in it's final home.
Here is another shot...
....of the canned animated messaging component.
Display Canned Animated Message
A little Video
Here's a little video clip of the display in action, taken with my cell phone camera. I haven't had the time to actually take a REAL video of the display. It shows a "video", and then a still image, and at the last part it shows what I call the canned animated text marquee, which is actually grabbing weather conditions from yahoo's weather API. All of this is managed in and with Drupal. No webserver is running on the actual display, but the playlist and data is all generated from Drupal.
Display Video (mp4)
I figured lots more people would be interested in what I did, than this, but I will chalk it up to getting lost in the noise and shuffle that is drupal.org.
Blog
I made a blog entry about my work on my digital signage system.
http://www.beekerstudios.com/mind/building-digital-signage-system-using-...
Seems to be getting some interest from people searching for "open source digital signage". There are solutions out there, like xibo, but none that use drupal, or simpletech, as I think this solution does. This solution however, is not an out-of-the-box solution, it's just a framework for how I did it.
I welcome any feedback here, or on my blog.
_
Nice-- very slick and interesting application of drupal! If you wrote it up 'officially' it would be suitable for a front page post imo.
Thanks
Near the end of this summer, I am going to be adding/building out some of the stuff I discuss at the bottom of the blog entry, so hopefully by then, I can give a more complete walkthrough of how and what to do.
Interesting
Very interesting application of Drupal. Subscribe.