Best Digital Signage Solution?

Hey Guys,

can some of you please share your experiences displaying your Data on TVs ?
I have a Samsung Monitor (s43bm700uu) and i’d like to use it to show a Dashboard in our Office (so it should only turn on during the week in the morning and turn off in the evening).

What can you guys recommend?
Is Posterbooking a good service for that?

Hi @hazenjaqdx3,

Thanks for opening this post.

This sounds like a good question for the community to answer as I do not have any experience with it but keen to find out more about it.

I can at least suggest looking for the requirements (especially for the supported web browsers) and the best would be to test and check if the Samsung TV device has the capability to support it.

I hope this helps.

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Hey @usman.ahmad

the Samsung TV technically works with the built-in Webbrowser. But its definitely not reliable enough for me.
I am starting the TV over Wake-On-Lan and very often it will not open the website (so it starts into the main menu).
Additionally, after 4 Hours the TV goes into sleeping mode, which I then again have to manually react to.

Yeah the Samsun tv’s browser is clunky. There are ways to install chrome on Samsung tv.

Or can you change the sleep timer to be on a schedule as it has nothing to do with grafana but the tv.

Also can you make your grafana url the default home url?

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What you can do is to setup a default page pointing to your Dashboard whenever the browser is launched (or if possible in TV to automatically open the browser as soon it starts).

Since we have already launched the Public Dashboards feature so could be more easier to put the URL into the browser as the default page instead of doing it manually.

Also found this from our GitHub as a known issue that Samsung Signage browsers are not supported with Grafana.

sorry ahmad I didnt see your reply.

I have fixed it by just using an old raspberry and installing fullscreenos on it.
The Monitor delivers just enough power via usb for the raspberry (well the raspberry starts up and displays grafana so its fine).

Weirdly enough I have a strange issue though.
When I start the monitor / Raspberry combination it will start and load the grafana dashboard. But the Values will not load until I scroll down or wiggle with the mouse. Do you know why this could happen ?

Is there anything to do to fix this?

Hi @hazenjaqdx3

First of Happy New Year!!

2nd, congrats on making it working!!

I must say that what you did is really amazing job and could be a very good article for a blog post if you are interested in writing one (let me know). :slight_smile:

Would be more helpful if you could send some screenshots or a video screencast so that we can understand it more clearly.

Hey Ahmad,

not too keen on writing a blog post about stuff I have only very basic knowledge about but maybe send me a blog post similar to what you imagine and I can have a look.

In this GIF you can see what im talking about. Basically, grafana will load just fine, but the boxes will stay grey until I move my mouse or scroll down.

If I dont connect to it via VNC and move the mouse it will stay like that for the whole day and still refresh, so it has nothing to do with the 20sec interval.

Okay so I just figured it out.

This is basically a combination of lazy loading and bad dashboard creation.
I used a very small empty visualization which queries the information for all of the other visualizations (I used to have every visualization query but this overloaded my raspberry). I placed this at the bottom of the screen.
Now while the TV actually displays all of the visualizations, it probaply didnt display this small query visualization, therefore not loading it.
Now when I scrolled down on vnc it displayed this box (which you cant see anyways) and therefore loaded the panels.

What I did was change one of the status visualizations to also query (one which is at the top) and the others to take their data from this visualization and filter their data.
And now it works flawlessly :smile:

Hopefully no one else has to figure this out in future :slight_smile: