How to create an information display

An information display is a screen thats (almost) always on and that displays interesting information.

A few years ago it was considered science fiction to have one in a home. Today you can do it too!

My Trello Screen:

Components:

- Raspberry Pi (cheap. around 50$ with case, USB WLan Stick and SD Card)
- Benq 24 inch Screen with senseye 3 (2011) [BenQ V2420, 24" TFT Wide 16:9, LED, DVI-D, schwarz]

Rough Plan:

Install Rasbian or any other Pi Linux distro to the system.
Instal chromium by typing "sudo apt-get install" in the console
Set to autorun Chromium after start. I've set it to autostart to trello.com in kiosk mode.

sudo nano /etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE/autostart

# comment everything and add the following lines
@xset s off
@xset -dpms
@xset s noblank

chromium-browser --kiosk http://trello.com

If you rather use midori:

@midori -e Fullscreen -a http://trello.com

Another idea is to power on and power off the display at night.

Suggestion: login by ssh to set this up.

Create those files:

/usr/bin/sleepMonitor.sh

#!/bin/sh
tvservice -o

/usr/bin/startMonitor.sh

tvservice -p;
sudo chvt 6;
sudo chvt 7;

Now start this with crontab.

I had difficulties getting crontab to use my timezone. Change for your timezone

sudo cp /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Zurich /etc/localtime

Note: always restart crontab.
Maybe you need to add "TZ=CET" in /etc/default/cron.

I generated the crontab entries using this generator.

Probably interesting if you don't want to do it with an raspberry pi but with an old laptop:
http://askubuntu.com/questions/61708/automatically-sleep-and-wake-up-at-specific-times