Screen Sharing software

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drunkmonk

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#243345 7-Dec-2018 10:30

Hey Team.

Long time, no post.

What I am hoping to do is essentially create a dashboard that can be streamed to multiple devices on the network. It doesn't need to be over the top feature wise, I just need to be able to put content on one screen, and it appear on other screens on the network.

Ideally I want the client to require no authentication so when the Intel stick boots up, it can be set up to just launch.

Does anyone use screen mirroring software/SaaS's int heir environment for wall boards/dashboards? Any recommendations?

BarTender

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#2141129 7-Dec-2018 12:08

Using chrome on your desktop you can connect to a Chromecast. But that's a manual step to cast to the Chromecast each time.

But wouldn't it make more sense to just have a standard dashboard homepage hosted on an internal web server that any browser can hit and has a single HTML page to meta-refresh/ ajax / reactjs to cycle between the different dashboards you want to show. Using Grafana it has awesome dashboard capabilities built in to cycle between screens.

Then all you would need would be a Raspberry Pi / ODroid or the compute stick, with a Linux kiosk distro loaded onto it. Then it "just" boots and loads the default browser full screen with the standard homepage. Preferably with some remote management and monitoring to allow you to reboot / power cycle the box if it dies or if the browser stops responding.

The advantage of having a single pane of glass web page then anyone can hit it from any browser rather than needing to build something special just for your kiosk that can't be used by non-kiosk devices.

TwoSeven

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#2141150 7-Dec-2018 12:57

Not sure what app you are using to create your dashboard - but since it would likely run on each machine, is there any reason why you just dont query a central data store?

If you want to automatically update clients whenever data changes - perhaps using WebSockets.

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drunkmonk

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#2141203 7-Dec-2018 14:11

So at the moment we are just showing power BI dashboards but going forward they may want to put a slideshow on, or a video, and what I am hoping is for if that is done on the "server" or hosting end, all the other screens can see it.

Being able to launch it in a browser would make it super easy because as you say, just have it launch om startup.

TwoSeven

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#2141254 7-Dec-2018 18:08

I believe Power BI direct query may have an automatic refresh option - you may need to double check. There are some limitations with DQ so it is worth while reading up on it.

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BarTender

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#2141406 8-Dec-2018 07:50

If you are wanting amazing open source graphing tool then Grafana is amazing for graphing metrics over a period of time such as transactions per second or grabbing temperature metrics and graphing them over time. Otherwise ELK aka Elastic + Logstash + Kibana is the way to log and graph event based metrics such as error events that you don't know when they will turn up and then displaying it in a meaningful way.

richms

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#2141543 8-Dec-2018 12:15

A friend needed to do something similar across a lan, I cant ask him for a week or so but the solution they ended up with from memory the final setup that worked was using OBS to make the stream from a window capture of the finance software they needed to view and then VLC opening a multicast RTP stream on the PCs that needed to watch it. Other solutions would have involved a server for people to connect to and view which would have been more work to get past their networking guys, whereas the multicast just worked.

This was just going out to PCs with VLC on them, not a dedicated player or similar hardware device but I know that in theory you should be able to multicast to and andriod box with VLC on it, but never tried it.

Their setup was simple, all PCs on a single lan with a simple switch, nothing wifi etc which I know would make multicast a challange.

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