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Raspberry Digital Signage plugins

Raspberry Digital Signage plugins

RASPBERRY DIGITAL SIGNAGE

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Available plugins: Web Kiosk | WordPress | MagicMirror²



Web Kiosk “plugin”

You can reactivate the display of the normal Chromium address bar with the following command via SSH as root:

sed -i 's/chromium-browser --kiosk --home-page/chromium-browser --kiosk-placeholder --home-page/g' /rds/home/rds-user/.rds-xinitrc
systemctl restart rds

 
This restores the standard address bar to Raspberry Digital Signage and tunes it in a system suitable for usage in web kiosks and multi-user web workstations environments (cafès, offices, schools, hotels, hospitals, libraries), where people can freely surf the web.

Raspberry Digital Signage with this “plugin” replaces the older Raspberry WebKiosk.

Revert with:

sed -i 's/chromium-browser --kiosk-placeholder --home-page/chromium-browser --kiosk --home-page/g' /rds/home/rds-user/.rds-xinitrc
systemctl restart rds

 



WordPress plugin

Raspberry Digital Signage admin interface allows you to set up the URL of the web resource to be displayed; it can be an Internet one (https://www.binaryemotions.com), a LAN URL (http://192.168.1.100/booking; http://booking.lan), or even a resource located internally, inside the Raspberry Pi’s filesystem. You know that already.

To simplify the creation/management of an internal site setup, the wordpress plugin adds a WordPress installation to the system (/rds/var/www/wordpress).

 

Plugin installation
From a SSH terminal of Raspberry Digital Signage (donors’), as root:

if ! grep -q bullseye /etc/apt/sources.list; then echo "deb http://raspbian.raspberrypi.org/raspbian/ bullseye main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list; fi
apt update
cd /root
wget https://www.binaryemotions.com/rds.plugins/raspberry-digital-signage-plugin-wordpress-18.0-1_all.deb
apt install -y /root/raspberry-digital-signage-plugin-wordpress-*.deb

 

Prerequisites
In order to view (and administer) the Pi’s WordPress site from your PC, just add the following line to your PC hosts file:

RaspberryPi_LAN_IP_in_this_moment wordpress

For example:

192.168.0.120 wordpress

This way, your PC will identify the URL http://wordpress as coming from the Pi.
Google for what “hosts” file means if unsure.

 

Usage
Set up your site on the internal WordPress installation: as a normal WordPress site, by browsing from your PC to http://wordpress.

WordPress admin (http://wordpress/wp-admin/) login is: admin / password.
Remember to change it. Binaryemotions won’t give basis/informations on how to use WordPress.

Make Raspberry Digital Signage display it: from the admin interface, set http://wordpress as the kiosk URL (the plugin’s installation will do it for you, but if you change it, then remember to set up this way).

Since the provided build of WordPress is of course outdated when you will install it, an advised preliminary step is to update it.

 

Disable network check
Upon boot, the system checks for the availability of the network, in order to display the proper admin interface if no network is available. However, with an internal WordPress installation, the network check could be undesired: in case, modify /rds/home/rds-user/.rds-xinitrc as:

function System_connectionCheck() {
    return 0
}

 

Useful things to do with this WordPress installation
Many. Among the others, a plugin which is worth a try is foyer.tv.
Install it from WordPress plugins page, then create a presentation and put its link in the Raspberry Digital Signage admin interface as the kiosk URL.

 

Uninstallation

apt --purge remove -y raspberry-digital-signage-plugin-wordpress
rm -R /rds/var/www/wordpress/wp-content
apt --purge autoremove -y

 



A MagicMirror² for Raspberry Pi plugin

MagicMirror² is an open source modular smart mirror platform. With a growing list of installable modules, the MagicMirror² allows you to convert your hallway or bathroom mirror into your personal assistant. MagicMirror² is the winner in the official Raspberry Pi magazine’s 50th issue celebration feature voted by the Raspberry Pi community.

This plugin installs in a few steps the MagicMirror² project on top of Raspberry Digital Signage. Code is built by the creator of the original MagicMirror with the incredible help of a growing community of contributors. Please consider a donation for them if you make use of it.

Quite cool actually.

 

Requirements
This plugin requires at least Raspberry Digital Signage v.18.

 

Plugin installation
From a SSH terminal of Raspberry Digital Signage (donors’), as root:

curl --silent https://deb.nodesource.com/gpgkey/nodesource.gpg.key | sudo apt-key add -
echo "deb https://deb.nodesource.com/node_16.x buster main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/nodesource.list
echo "deb-src https://deb.nodesource.com/node_16.x buster main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/nodesource.list
apt update
wget https://www.binaryemotions.com/rds.plugins/raspberry-digital-signage-plugin-magicmirror-18.3-1_all.deb
apt install -y ./raspberry-digital-signage-plugin-magicmirror-*.deb
apt install -y npm

 

Customizing
Please see the official documentation.
Config file is located in /rds/home/rds-user/MagicMirror/. Once you modify the config file, restart the signage stack: systemctl restart rds.

 

Uninstallation

apt --purge remove -y raspberry-digital-signage-plugin-magicmirror
apt --purge autoremove -y

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