Those following my blog know that I recently bought a Mele A1000 to play around. For those who are not familiar with this device, the Mele A1000 is a $70 Android set-top box featuring an AllWinner A10 cortex A8 processor and lots of peripherals, and it can easily be hacked to run a Linux distributions. This hardware would also be a great digital signage player thanks to its video playback capabilities: up to 2160p video decoding and 1080p video output. Last year, I ported Xibo, an open source digital signage player, to ARM and ran it in the Beagleboard emulator (qemu), but I hadn’t had the opportunity to try it out in a real hardware. I’ve tried this rootfs based on Linaro ARM Linux Internet Platform (ALIP) image for BeagleBoard in the Mele A1000, by following an adaptation of the method I provided earlier. For this demo, I created a […]
Portwell AMDY-7000 Series Mini-ITX Boards Based on AMD Embedded Processors
American Portwell Technology has announced the AMDY-7000 Series Mini-ITX embedded system boards targeting applications that require high quality graphics output with low power consumption such as digital signage, surveillance security monitoring, point of sales (PoS) and more. The company provides 3 families of AMDY-7000 series mini-ITX boards: AMDY-7000 – Single-core AMD Athlon II Neo R44L processor. AMDY-7001 – Dual-core AMD Turion II Neo N54H, AMD Athlon II Neo N36L or single-core AMD Athlon II Neo R44L processor. AMDY-7002 – Dual-core AMD Fusion G T56N processor. The AMDY-7000/7001/7002 Series models are powered by AMD Fusion processors featuring ATI HD 6320 and HD 4200 GPU. Depending upon the model, the power consumption ranges from a 12W to 25W. All boards can support up to 8GB DDR3 SO-DIMM memory, dual display via VGA/DVI/HDMI/LVDS and dual LVDS (AMDY-7002 only), PCIe x1, PCIe x16 or half-size mini-PCIe depending on the model and dual Gbit Ethernet. […]
Gocal Europe Android Digital Signage Players Based on AMLogic AML8726
Gocal Europe is a dutch company with offices in Shenzhen and Hong Kong providing OEM/ODM high tech solutions such as digital signage and Android TV solutions including players as well as software solutions via HelloTV. The company has 2 digital signage players running Android 4.0 (ICS): UFO-TV This player is based on AMLogic AML8726M3 and features 1GB RAM, 4GB flash, HDMI IN and HMDI OUT. Here are the device specifications: CPU – AMLogic AM8726 M3 (ARM Cortex A9) @ 1GHz with Mali-400 GPU System Memory – 1 GB Flash – 4 GB Video Container Formats – avi, mpeg, vob,mkv, ts, m2ts, wmv and rm Video Codecs – MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4, MPEG2-HD and VC-1. Audio Formats – MP3, WMA, WAV, MIDI, OGG, AC3, DTS, ACC and APE External Storage – SD, SDHC and MMC cards. USB – 2x USB 2.0 Host ports Connectivity – Ethernet 10/100 Mbps, WiFi and Bluetooth Video […]
Axiomtek MANO120 Mini-ITX Board Powered by AMD G-series APU
Axiomtek announced the MANO120 mini-ITX motherboard featuring an AMD G-Series APU dual core T56N with AMD A55E FCH which supports dual video output (dual views) via VGA, HDMI and LVDS interface. The board can support up to 4 GB of DDR3 1333 memory, up to 5 SATA hard drives and a CFast slot. The MANO120 also comes with one PCIe x4 slot and one PCI Express Mini Card slot. The company says the MANO120 industrial grade motherboard is ideal for digital signage, DVR (Digital Video Recording), and NVR (Network Video Recorder) applications. Here are Axiomtek MANO120 mini-ITX board specifications. CPU – AMD G-Series APU T56N @ 1.65 GHz with AMD Radeon HD6320 Graphic engine Chipset – AMD A55E FCH System Memory – 204-pin SO-DIMM supports DDR3-1066/1333 max (up to 4 GB) BIOS – AMI EFI 16Mb SPI SSD – CFast slot Expansion Interfaces: PCIe x4 slot PCIe Mini Card CFast […]
Xibo Digital Signage in Raspberry Pi Emulator (Step 1)
Xibo (pronounced eX-E-bO) is an open source, multi-display, multi-zone, fully scheduled digital signage client/server solution written in Python and dotNET. If you are not familiar with Xibo you can visit http://xibo.org.uk/ or/and read my introduction XIBO: An Open Source Digital Signage Server/Client. The Raspberry Pi is a low cost board based on Broadcom BCM2835 (ARM1176 Core) that should be available for sale at the end of January / beginning of February at http://www.raspberrypi.com. There are two versions of the board: Model A: 128 MB RAM and no Ethernet Model B: 256 MB RAM with 10/100 Mbit Ethernet BCM 2835 also features a Videocore GPU supporting OpenGL and 1080p30 video decoding that makes it ideal for multimedia applications such as digital signage players. The board support both HDMI and composite video output. You should also be able to connect a LCD via the DSI interface. If we can make Xibo run […]
Solid-Run CuBox: Open Source Platform for Android TV, Media Center and NAS Development
Solid-Run CuBox is a miniature open source development platform based on Marvell Armada 510 SoC (88AP510) and aimed at applications such as multimedia, set-top-box, network attached storage (NAS), thin client, digital signage, automation… CuBox measures 55mm x 55mm x 42mm (so it’s not a Cube) and consuming less than 3 watts. The device runs Android 2.2 or Linux 2.6 on an 800MHz Marvell Armada 510 CPU (ARMv7 architecture) with 1GB of DDR3 memory and a microSD slot. It also includes eSATA, USB, infrared, S/PDIF, HDMI and gigabit Ethernet interfaces. CuBox Developer Platform includes the following key features – Marvell Armada 510 SoC – 800 MHz dual issue ARM PJ4 processor, VFPv3, wmmx SIMD and 512KB L2 cache. 1GByte DDR3 at 800MHz 1080p Video Decode Engine OpenGL ES 2.0 graphic engine HDMI 1080p Output (with CEC function) Gigabit Ethernet, SPDIF (optical audio), eSata 3Gbps, 2xUSB 2.0, micro-SD, micro-USB (console) Standard Infra-red receiver […]
Qt Quick QML Digital Signage Demo Part 2
Following up on Qt Quick QML Digital Signage Demo Part 1, I’ve updated the digital signage demo to support the following: Play 5 videos in a loop Display 5 pictures in a loop where the picture is changed every 5 seconds Use a (twitter) RSS feed for the scrolling text I initially planned to use QML to list the media files, but it is apparently not possible without using C/C++ and I may do it later on. So instead, I hard-coded the video and picture playlists in the QML files with the ListModel element. Videos are located in the video directory and pictures in the pic folder. An index is needed to scroll thru the playlist, but QML does not support global variables, so I created a JavaScript file (globals.js) to store the video and picture index: // Global variables in JavaScript file var iVideoIndex = 0 var iPicIndex = […]
Qt Quick QML Digital Signage Demo Part 1
I’ve recently started to play around with Qt and since I’d like to do a digital signage player running on Raspberry Pi, I’ve decided to try to make a simple digital signage demo application to evaluate the development platform. In Part 1, my goal was to make a 3 zones layout with a video zone, a picture zone and a scrolling text zone. I would just play one hard-coded media in each zone and the video and scrolling text would have to continuously loop. I used Qt Creator to create a “Pigital Signage” application (or should it be Πgital Signage ?). To create the 3 zones I used the Gridview Element with 3 rectangles: Video zone: 600×432 Picture zone: 200×432 Text zone: 800×48 Displaying the image is very easy with the Image Element:
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Image { source: "pic/phone.jpg" } |
The video playback was also supposed to be easy with the Video Element but it can […]