How I set up a digital information screen for my Science Department

There’s so much you can do with it!

TL;DR I split them into 4 steps below;

1. Raspberry Pi + a computer screen/TV
2. Yodeck on Raspberry Pi
3. Google Sheets ➡️ Google Slides ➡️ Yodeck
4. Done! ✅ – pictures of my setup!

Raspberry Pi + a computer screen/TV

What you need for the receiver;

1. Raspberry Pi 3B+ (the latest RPi 3A+ not gonna work unfortunately as the software not yet updated) I bought one from thepihut.
2. A power supply adapter 5.1V 2.5A – the RPi connected via micro USB. You can get one here.
3. A micro SD card (here)
4. A HDMI cable.
5. Ethernet cable, however the RPi have an in-built WiFi.
6. A TV screen – we got a 48inch HD TV from ao.com, a decent one would cost about £250 ish.

Yodeck on RPi

Now all items purchased and ready, time to do some installation.

1. Sign up for a free account on Yodeck.com. They offer free subscription for one screen.
2. You can read the installation guide here if its easier.
3. Download the software.
4. Flash it onto your micro SD card using Etcher.
5. If you intend to run on WiFi, eject your micro SD card once finished, then insert it again, edit the SETTINGS.txt file to include your WiFi details. Read here.
6. Eject SD card, insert card to RPi.
7. Connect to screen, let it boot and initialise.
8. A code will appear.
9. Key in code shown in your YoDeck dashboard to register monitor.
10. BOOM! DONE!

Raspberry Pi 3B+ 👌🏻

Customising your setup

You can do so much with it – schedule your shows, create playlists and customise the widgets positions.

👇🏻 Screen setup & scheduling 👇🏻

Scheduling your shows. Left is what happen when no shows are on displayed on screen.

Customising the ‘show’ i.e. screen with different pictures, playlists and widgets. 👇🏻

An example of my screen setup

See here if you’d like a list of BBC RSS feeds to create a news ticker.

My trick to create a more real time changing ‘slides’ by using Google Slides (plus Google Sheets for Seneca graphs)

1. Measure the width & height in pixels of where you planning to place it.
2. On Google Slides ➡️ File ➡️ Page Setup ➡️ Change to the size in pixels.
3. Customise as you like!

Customise your slide size to match the size of an area in your display screen.

4. Publish your slide to the web.

5. Copy and paste the link as web address on Yodeck.

Publish to the web!

I created a chart on Google Sheets then copy it to Google Slides. Any changes made on Google Sheets will be automatically refreshed on Google Slides.

Yodeck wrote their guide here and here.

Other alternatives that looks good, however not yet tested personally;

1. Amazon Fire Stick TV + playdigitalsignage. (Link)
2. Google Chromecast + screenCloud. (Link)

Hope this helps! Thanks for reading.