Thoughts on real-time data display?

2 pointsSirAllCaps2y ago2 comments

I'm responsible for software/web development at a medium sized company, and have been tasked with projecting real-time data on a large monitor—with data primarily coming from authenticated web API endpoints from our website.

I'm not looking for a detailed guide, but rather just some helpful tips, opinions or your experiences with choice of hardware and software. The choice of frontend web framework is the least of my concerns here.

## Hardware

1. "Dumb" monitor/display + Raspberry Pi?

2. Monitor/display with built in computer?

3. Wireless display (e.g. Chromecast)?

## Development & Deployment

I'd prefer to be able to configure, develop, debug & deploy changes remotely from the workstation at my desk.

Depending on the hardware, any OS more suited for this than others? Some software/scripts/frameworks useful in your case?

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Very much appreciate any thoughts or advise, whether its theoretical or from personal experience with a similar task.

2 comments

2 comments · 2 top-level

az09mugen2y ago

Just my 2 cents, but assuming the computation needed between incoming data and what has to be displayed is low, I'd go with the 1).

-A small webserver on the raspbian that takes data feed and updates in realtime through websocket (any lib in go, python, JS, or whatever will do the work, see https://github.com/search?q=websocket&type=repositories, pick your poison)

-An ssh connection to the pi to restart the server or update the code/package

-Think of how to deliver the code/package to the pi from the git repo,

-One last thing, even it does not seem a critical app supervise the service/get some metrics on the pi if you can

And voilà

klausnrooster2y ago

Years ago heard some airports used to use Powerpoint and DDE for flight info displays. Data was coming from ?? probably a mainframe. Haven't looked into it even though I have a use case similar to what fast-food outfits use to coordinate order assembly. Imagine it's not real-time. Might be reasonably fast.