In a recent encounter with the principal of our local high school, a conversation unfolded around her wish for a straightforward yet effective digital solution to display announcements. Despite the existence of commercial options, their steep prices were beyond the school’s budget constraints. This challenge sparked an idea: why not leverage the versatility of a Raspberry Pi, paired with a standard TV, to create an accessible digital display? The concept involved setting up the TV to showcase images from a shared folder, offering a budget-friendly yet efficient means to communicate important announcements.

The hardware of choice was a Raspberry PI Zero 2 W as it checked all the requirements:

• Low power consumption (can be powered by most TVs usb port
• Wifi-enabled
• Budget friendly

For the software side of things I decided to use the suggested os (port debian bullseye 32 bit at the time) with the MagicMirror application. MagicMirror offers a solid and modular base for presenting info, and the Background Slideshow plugin seemed to be the best option to display full screen images from a shared folder. I removed most of the other module and kept only time and weather module. Apart from that, samba was installed to provide access to the gallery folder over the network and ssh was enabled to allow for remote configuration changes.

I could develop some custom software, but using of-the-shelf software provides faster time-to-market and less maintance

More details can be found at the project’s page and on the projects repository