I’m looking at options for making a digital menu board system. Unfortunately I don’t recall actually even seeing one around town, and AFAIK nobody supplies them locally.
The idea is that there would be a few televisions displaying menus and pricing from what are basically low-end networked media players. (You feed them some .JPGs or some .AVIs, perhaps a really basic configuration telling them to change to the lunch menu at 11am, and that’s it).
I thought someone here might have some expertise regarding features to look for, useful software, or contacts nearby (ie, Edmonton, as per Location. :))
I am sure there is proprietary software to do all of this for you but I am pretty sure you could rig web browsers and html to do most of it. A link to the Lunch or Dinner menus could just be a spot on the decor that can be clicked on to flip them manually or have them flip at certain times. A decent web design place could probably whip out a basic DB page set that could allow you to do this pretty easily with a more user friendly back end.
drachillix: As sort of a last resort we can get a few days worth of programming and an MS Word template or something software-wise, but if there’s a product that comes with decent software that would be better.
Merijeek: Wow! That’s… a bit of overkill for here.
I’d prefer something better than this (doesn’t have HDMI out, uses memory cards instead of ethernet, so it’s hard to update), but way less than the Cisco thing. (We don’t need streaming video or any of the high-end stuff that has, and 1U is way too big).
Something more like this would be good. (Small, could hide one behind every TV, etc). Even the gigabit and wifi on that are excess to requirements right now.
One site with info I found was this: http://www.digitalsignagetoday.com/ , but there’s almost too much there, so I was hoping someone here had done the research and discovered the pitfalls already.
My university’s food court uses digital menu boards and I think they may just use PowerPoint (set on a loop) and a bunch of LCD screens. It may be one of the simpler ways of doing it…
