Having taken an agile development approach to our digital screen technology, it has been interesting as the various elements emerge based on our current needs. Lately there has been the need for quick ways to push posters and images to the screens for private events and one-off occasions.

Due to the complexity of the various modes, and the intricacies of events-based data and automatic scheduling it has been difficult incorporating these needs into the system. Our solution was to use Google Drive as a means to override the screens with temporary content. This means our staff can manage content for private events using tables and mobile devices, and watch the updates push through in real time.

The pathway of routes now looks like this

HOW?

There are two main elements to the override process – firstly, we are using BackboneJS as the application framework because this provides a routing structure that controls the various signage modes. We added a new route at the beginning of the process to check for content added to Google Drive – if there is no content the signs follow their normal modes of operation.

Google Drive Integration

Google provide a nice way to publish web services, hidden amongst the scripts editor inside Google sheets. We created a script that loops through a Drive directory and publishes a list of contents as JSON –  you can see the result of that script here. By making the directory public, any images we load into the drive are picked up by the script. The screens then check the script for new content regularly. The good thing about this is that we can add content to specially named folders – if the folder names match either the venue or the specific machine name – all targeted screens will start showing that content.

It seems that this form of web hosting will be deprecated in Google Drive at the end of August 2016. But the links we are using to get the image might still work. If not we can find a workaround – possibly by listing urls to content hosted elsewhere in the Google sheet and looking that up.

The main benefits of this solution are being able to override the normal mode of operation using Google Drive on a mobile device. This even works with video – we added some more overrides so the poster mode doesn’t loop till the next slide until after the video has finished – video brings in several issues when considering timings for digital signage. One problem with hosting via Google Drive is that files over 25MB don’t work due to Google’s antivirus checking warning which prevents the files being released.

We’ll wait to see if this new functionality gets used – and if it is reliable after August 2016. In fact – this mode might be usable on its own to manage other screens around the various venues which until now were not up datable. If successful it will vastly reduce the need to run around with memory sticks before private events – and hopefully let us spend more time generating the wonderful content that the technology is designed to publish for our visitors.

You can download the latest release and try it for yourself here.