UPDATE 11 July 2023 – Screenly have changed Screenly OSE (open source edition) to Anthias. I will be doing some testing and will write a new article on this in the coming weeks.
If you have ever wanted to have a TV display in a lobby or reception area displaying your latest news etc this is the guide for you. The commercial options out there get expensive quickly and that is something that schools in particular can’t work with.
TLDR; Get a Pi, install Screenly OSE, set a Google Slides presentation as the only asset and you got yourself an easily updatable digital signage display for next to nothing. If your school or business use G-Suite, even better!
After trying briefly to write my own custom one for our school I ended up coming across Screenly and their Open Source Edition. They do offer a Pro version too, but for what we needed the OSE one was just fine.
When used in combination with Google Slides, it allows us to have an easily updatable display that can be managed by any members of staff with a Google or G-Suite account (that means you too C2K schools!). Simples!
What you will need for this:
- Raspberry Pi (would recommend the starter kit Pi 3)
- Large TV / Monitor with HDMI
- Minimum 4GB Micro SD card
- Google account (personal or G-Suite will work)
First thing to do is download Screenly OSE. You can install it onto a Pi running Raspbian but it is much easier just to use the pre-made image. You can grab the latest image file from their Github repo here
Once that is downloaded you need to flash the image onto your SD card. I have found the easiest tool for this to be Etcher. Open the image file in Etcher and then pick your SD Card and hit Flash. This process can take up to ten minutes depending on the speed of your SD card. Once it is finished pop the SD Card into your Raspberry Pi and power it up.
When it first boots you will see the IP address displayed for managing the device. Visit this address on your web browser on your computer / mobile device to access the management screen. Remember to add :8080 to the end of the address!
FAIR WARNING: be aware that this admin panel has no password protection so anyone who finds the address can mess with it. Make sure it is on a different VLAN to protect it or you can search Google for various ways to put a password on it yourself. Password protection is on the release schedule for the next update which hopefully will be out soon.
You can add “assets” to Screenly from this admin panel. Upload images, movie files etc and set times and dates for when they are active and how long they should be displayed before going to the next asset.
We are not going to use it this way however. We will only add a single asset which will be a URL to our Google Slides presentation. Let’s make the presentation first.
Go to Google Slides and make yourself a quick presentation with some of the images and information you want to show on your fancy pants new digital sign. Don’t worry about slide timings, they will be set to a fixed time at the end.
Once the presentation is ready go to File and Publish to Web… Choose Link and set auto advance slides to whatever value you wish (we use 5 seconds). Also make sure to tick both boxes underneath. Once you hit Publish you will be given a URL. Copy and paste this URL into another browser window and visit it to check it is working. Your slide show should start automatically and loop on completion.
Now go back to the Screenly admin panel at http://your-ip:8080 and click Add Asset. Give it a nickname, and paste in the URL into the Asset URL box. Asset type should be webpage. Set the start date to today and an end date in the future. As this is the only slide I would set this to years in the future.
For duration I chose to use about twice the length of the presentation. So if you have 20 slides at 5 seconds each then set it to 200 seconds. You can set this as high as you like. What it does is reload the presentation every x seconds. This means if you update the slides on Google Slides, it will not show on the display until this Duration has passed. Unless you need lightning fast updates to the screen something like 30 minutes (or 1800 seconds) would be fine.
Hit Save. Your asset has been added but is not yet active. Turn off the default assets and turn on your new one so it is the only Active Asset. It should look similar to the screen below.
Within a few seconds you should see your Google presentation on your Raspberry Pi display. Now you can share editor access to the Google Slides presentation with any colleagues that also need to update the screen and you should never have to touch the screen or the Pi again, everything can be done remotely by simply updating the presentation!
This means that you can update the presentation, add images etc using your iPad via the Google Slides app!
One other tip I would give is to check your TV for a timer. Most will have the ability to set an on and off timer that means you can set the screen to shut off overnight to save power. The Pi can remain on as it uses so little power.
If you find that your TV doesn’t pick up the Pi HDMI when switching on after a timer, then set a cron job on the Pi to reboot a few minutes after the TV comes on in the morning. This seems to trigger HDMI source switching on most TVs.
Question: Did you try this behind a proxy and if you did how did you enter the proxy details for screenly?
Haven’t tried behind a proxy so far. It appears that it doesn’t support proxy out of the box but a quick search on the GitHub repo seems to show some people that have patched a workaround.
could you link us, i tried before i posted but found nothing but im not that great with github tbh, Thanks.
Sure thing!
There is this post staying that proxy isn’t officially supported. https://support.screenly.io/hc/en-us/articles/213678423-Does-Screenly-support-routing-traffic-via-a-Proxy-server-?mobile_site=true
Then this github issue seems to say that if you have a proxy that doesn’t have username and password you can make it work. See comments about adding set_proxy into the file misc/uzbl.rc.
If your proxy requires authentication then you may be out of luck https://github.com/wireload/screenly-ose/issues/158
I hope that helps a little and you get it working.
Thanks, I’m going to have a play with it seems simple enough (he says).
I know, old post, but I did just this at our high school and it works to a point. Any new edits on the slide show do not show up on the screenly display. I had to republish the slide show and make a new asset. Did I miss something?
The refresh interval set on the asset should solve it. We have ours set to 600 seconds so every ten minutes the asset reloads, so you do have to wait up to 10 mins for changes to be shown but we don’t need to delete and redo assets like you have. Maybe shorten the time on the asset and also check in the settings to see if any form of caching is enabled on the Screenly install? Let me know how you get on!
Hi. Whenever I changed on the google slide I have to stop the publish and start a new one. Google will generate a new URL. I have to update the URL in screenly too. How did you retain the same URL after editing the slide?
I have never had to republish. Once I publish the presentation and add it to Screenly I just edit the presentation on Google and it “just works”. I have never had to republish to make changes show up. Once the Screenly asset time is up it reloads the slideshow and picks up any changes I have made.
Hey Colin!
I just set this up at my house as a digital bulletin board to keep us on track. I set it up with a Harmony Hub, so the TV turns on at a certain time with certain things scheduled. I LOVE IT!
I wanted to ask. Do you know of any other good sites that do things like the weather widget and the clock widget? I am wanting to get the most I can out of this!
Thank you!
That is such a cool setup with the Harmony Hub!
I haven’t tried any weather things but after a very brief look around I think I would use this one https://weatherwidget.io/ and maybe paste the embed code into my own HTML page and then upload that to the Screenly box? That or host the HTML on some free webhosting and point to it using the Screenly URL mode.
Let me know how you get on!
Tried embedding a lot of things into a “google site”, they would never load after being made assets. No idea why. Havent tried embedding them into a wordpress site and added that as an asset yet.
I do have one issue. I would like only certain things to display on certain days. Such as, I want an asset to display on Monday and Wednesday, but ONLY those days. Is there anyway to do this, without making 1000 assets for every monday and wednesday in the near future?
I get an error that the transitions are not support, but we do not have any transition set on the slides. I can click dismiss, but then they stop repeating, any suggestions?
Update – I get an error that the transitions are not support, but we do not have any transition set on the slides. I can click dismiss, but then they stop repeating, any suggestions?
I can click dismiss and it still works, is there a way to not get the message, or to automate the clicking of the dismiss?
I am afraid I have not seen this error come up when we have used it so I am afraid I cannot help!