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November 14, 2023

Using Raspberry Pi as Digital Signage Player with OptiSigns

Raspberry Pi makes excellent Digital Signage Player due to a few key reasons:

OptiSigns is compatible with and work well on Raspberry Pi, we recommend Raspberry Pi 3B+ and above.

For Raspberry Pi 4 or older, continue to read this article
For Raspberry Pi 5, please read this article.

This article will guide you through how to setup and configure your Raspberry Pi device as Digital Signage Player with OptiSigns. Once finish, you will have a Raspberry Pi that:

Auto launch OptiSigns at start up
It will resume, play what's assigned to it, even after hard power lost
It will not go to sleep
It can play downloadable content (images, video, document) even when internet is lost

How to set up OptiSigns on Raspberry Pi 4 or older:

‍‍

There are 2 options to get OptiSigns running on your devices.

1. Download and use OptiSigns prebuilt image. (You will need a Windows machine to unzip, flash SD Card, the zip file does not unzip on MacOS)

2. Install the OptiSigns player on a fresh Raspberry Pi OS.

Option 1: Download and use OptiSigns prebuilt image

Download the latest SD card image here. And then Unzip and Flash the SD Card image to your SD Card (minimum 16GB card is required).

You can use Etcher to flash the image to the SD card. Just select the OptiSigns Pre-built image file as the source, and the SD card as the target. Then click Flash.

Once the SD card is built, boot your Raspberry PI up. You will see the OptiSigns player launched automatically after the boot.

You now can go to our portal at https://app.optisigns.com/

to pair the screen and start assigning content to it.

For detail steps click here.

Option 2: Install the OptiSigns player on a fresh Raspberry Pi OS.

Here are the high level steps:

1) Get a fresh image of Raspberry Pi OS boot up and configure your network.

2) Download OptiSigns to your Raspberry Pi OS an run it.

3) Pair your screen with OptiSigns portal and start assigning content to it.

So let's dive in:

1) Get a fresh image of Raspberry Pi OS and configure network

First download a fresh image of Raspberry Pi OS. We recommend "Raspberry Pi OS Stretch with desktop and recommended software". This will come with all the software we need include Chromium.

There's already an official guide on how to set up your SD card with Raspberry Pi OS image here.

After flashing the SD card and boot up, connect to your network.

2) Download OptiSigns AppImage to your Raspberry Pi OS and run it

Download OptiSigns AppImage file here.

If you not familiar with AppImage, it is a way Linux package app to run just like you would run an .app file on Mac or .exe file in Windows.

Once Downloaded, open File Explorer, right click on the downloaded file and select Properties.

In the Properties box.Click Permissions tabThe in the Access Control -> Execute drop down. Select AnyoneThen Click OK.

After that, double click on the optisigns.arm7l.AppImage file to execute it.In the pop up, select Execute.

Raspberry Pi is not very fast, so it may take a few seconds to load.The app will run in full screen mode, and generate a pairing code for you to pair with the app.optisigns.com portal.You can also move the mouse around and see the top 3 buttons to resize, open side bar menu or close the app.

On the side menu, you can set Orientation, etc.The app has AutoStart and Fullscreen on Startup checked as default.So now, next time the Raspberry Pi started up, it will run OptiSigns app automatically.

3) Pair your screen with OptiSigns portal and start assigning content to it

You now can go to our portal at https://app.optisigns.com/

to pair the screen and start assigning content to it.

For detail steps click here.

Summary:

Now your Raspberry Pi image already has Digital Signage player features configured:

AutoStart up and launch OptiSigns.
It will resume, play what's assigned to it, even after hard power lost.
It will not go to sleep.
It can play downloadable content (images, video, document) even when internet is lost.

If you have any questions or issues that need support, please feel free to reach out to us at support@optisigns.com.

Ready to get started?

If you are not using OptiSigns yet, you can sign up now for a free 14 days trial, all features included.

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