Introduction In my previous post I showed how we turned a Raspberry Pi into a digital display device by installing a Video Looper application. Now let’s take a look at how to fill that display with content. First, do yourself a favor and read fellow writer Leanne Mobley’s wonderful post on design resources for librarians. She provides a great overview of tools out there that can add some polish do your content and provide a starting point. The focus of this post is how I used Microsoft PowerPoint to create the content for our Digital Displays. I went with PowerPoint as it met two major requirements: low cost and user familiarity. Like most projects I create, my aim is to be able to hand this off to another user and bring them up to speed quickly. By going with a program that is available on every system on lab, it…
Tag: Display
Digital Displays on a Budget: Hardware
Introduction At the JPL Library we recently remodeled our collaborative workspace. This process allowed us to repurpose underutilized televisions into digital displays. Digital displays can be an effective way to communicate key events and information to our patrons. However, running displays has usually required either expensive hardware (installing new cables to tap into local media hosts) or software (Movie Maker, 3rd Party software), sometimes both. We had the displays ready but needed cost effective solutions for hosting and creating the content. Enter Raspberry Pi and a movie creator that can be found in any Microsoft Office Suite purchased since 2010… Microsoft PowerPoint. In this post I will cover how to select, setup, and install the hardware. The follow up post will go over the content creation aspect. Hardware Requirements Displays Luckily for us, this part took care of itself. If you need to obtain a display, I have two…