I had set one (Pi 3B+)up to do both a website as well as a public service announcement slideshow display for a local Community TV. Used PHP/CMSimple for the site and wrote a custom slider.
Things I learned:
- set the pi to reboot on poweroff
- Given this was TV used the AV output on the PI displaying in NTSC 4:3 (to support customers with older TVs), so had to be aware of overscan margins
- Added a startup script to start chromium in kiosk mode and open the slider page for the show side. worked 95% of the time, if not just power off then on.
- part of the troubleshooting was just unplug and replug - but SD cards will choke on too many power cycles, so instead of SD use a USB->SATA cable and a regular spinning rust HDD - slower but VERY reliable, the journaling file system can recover after power-outage.
- Get the right USB->SATA cable, USB-3 models seem to be more responsive and the PI can boot from them, there are some are too slow and the Pi will fail to boot.
- Slider had it's own login page (outside of CMSimple) to remotely manage the slideshow.
- Also changed the SSH Port to something uncommon to thwart bad guys.
Things I learned:
- set the pi to reboot on poweroff
- Given this was TV used the AV output on the PI displaying in NTSC 4:3 (to support customers with older TVs), so had to be aware of overscan margins
- Added a startup script to start chromium in kiosk mode and open the slider page for the show side. worked 95% of the time, if not just power off then on.
- part of the troubleshooting was just unplug and replug - but SD cards will choke on too many power cycles, so instead of SD use a USB->SATA cable and a regular spinning rust HDD - slower but VERY reliable, the journaling file system can recover after power-outage.
- Get the right USB->SATA cable, USB-3 models seem to be more responsive and the PI can boot from them, there are some are too slow and the Pi will fail to boot.
- Slider had it's own login page (outside of CMSimple) to remotely manage the slideshow.
- Also changed the SSH Port to something uncommon to thwart bad guys.