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Ask Slashdot: Tiny PCs To Drive Dozens of NOC Monitors?
mushero writes: We are building out a new NOC with dozens of LCD monitors and need ideas for what PCs to use to drive all those monitors. What is small and easy to stack, rack, power, manage, replace, etc.?
The room is 8m x 8m. It has a central 3x3 LCD array, as well as mixed-size and -orientation LCD monitors on the front and side walls (plus scrolling LEDs, custom desks, team tables, etc) — it's designed as a small version of the famous AT&T Ops Center. We are an MSP and this is a tour showcase center, so more is better — most have real functions for our monitor teams, DBAs, SoC, alert teams, and so on, 7x24. We'll post pics when it's done.
But what's the best way to drive all this visual stuff? The simplest approach for basic/tiny PCs is to use 35-50 of these — how do we do that effectively? Almost all visuals are browser-only, so any PC can run them (a couple will use Apple TV or Cable feeds for news). The walls are modular and 50cm thick, and we'll have a 19" rack or two, so we have room, and all professional wiring/help as needed.
Raspberry Pis are powerful enough for this, but painful to mount and wire. Chromeboxes are great and the leading candidate, as the ASUS units can drive two monitors. The Intel NUC can also do this — those and the Chromeboxes are easily stackable. My dream would be a quad-HDMI device in Chromebox form factor. Or are there special high-density PCs for this with 4-8-16 HDMI outputs?
Each unit will be hard-wired to its monitor, and via ip-KVM (need recommendations on that, too, 32+ port) for controls. Any other ideas for a cool NOC are also appreciated, as we have money and motivation to do anything that helps the team and the tours.
The room is 8m x 8m. It has a central 3x3 LCD array, as well as mixed-size and -orientation LCD monitors on the front and side walls (plus scrolling LEDs, custom desks, team tables, etc) — it's designed as a small version of the famous AT&T Ops Center. We are an MSP and this is a tour showcase center, so more is better — most have real functions for our monitor teams, DBAs, SoC, alert teams, and so on, 7x24. We'll post pics when it's done.
But what's the best way to drive all this visual stuff? The simplest approach for basic/tiny PCs is to use 35-50 of these — how do we do that effectively? Almost all visuals are browser-only, so any PC can run them (a couple will use Apple TV or Cable feeds for news). The walls are modular and 50cm thick, and we'll have a 19" rack or two, so we have room, and all professional wiring/help as needed.
Raspberry Pis are powerful enough for this, but painful to mount and wire. Chromeboxes are great and the leading candidate, as the ASUS units can drive two monitors. The Intel NUC can also do this — those and the Chromeboxes are easily stackable. My dream would be a quad-HDMI device in Chromebox form factor. Or are there special high-density PCs for this with 4-8-16 HDMI outputs?
Each unit will be hard-wired to its monitor, and via ip-KVM (need recommendations on that, too, 32+ port) for controls. Any other ideas for a cool NOC are also appreciated, as we have money and motivation to do anything that helps the team and the tours.
https://www.barco.com/en/solutions/Control-rooms
http://www.displayport.org/cables/driving-multiple-displays-from-a-single-displayport-output/
One server, run virtual desktops and have 35-50 thin clients driving your monitors.
No sig here...
Take a look at the nVidia NVS line of GPUs, they're designed for digital signage but would probably work for you - the new ones support up to 32 displays driven from a single machine (4 cards).
There are a variety of cases to help you mount the Pis. They're lightweight enough to where you can literally just heat shrink them and zip tie or foam tape them down. Pis or similar are going to be your lowest-power, lowest-footprint option no matter what. And since these are just operating informational displays, you really don't need anything more than VNC (or the like) to control them, because bandwidth is not an issue. A KVM, IP or not, is literally just something which can fail.
I'm not a Pi advocate specifically, but I fail to see what's wrong with them for this application.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Seriously. A small form factor real computer. Put in 2 graphics cards that can run 5 monitors each. Done. You will have to look a little, but for our... let's just say I bought a lot of 7570 I think (a year and a half in the past) That had 5 mini displayport outputs each. Work like a charm and run up to 5 monitors. What exactly was the problem?
http://gizmodo.com/this-130-wi...
Asus and Intel are making these types of devices. There are probably other companies making them by now as well.
Sounds like raspberry pi. You should only be mounting and wiring things once.
NVS 810
Here is the review:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9760/nvidia-launches-nvs-810-digital-signage-video-card
As the content is likely mostly static: What about a single PC with many USB3.0 -> HDMI adapters + USB 3.0 Hubs? Sure, refresh rate will likely go down to something like 10 Hz because of bandwidth limitation but that should fine for your kind of content and driving all screens from the same PC could be very useful for administration.
Jan
What is the name of the MSP, so I can avoid dealing with them? If they could not solve that prolem themself, it is scary to think how they can "help" customers.
This board supports 8x mini display port output.
http://anandtech.com/show/9760/nvidia-launches-nvs-810-digital-signage-video-card
http://www.ambery.com/2x2hdvga... Shows all sorts of combinations. rack mounted
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
I'd use a NUC form factor with one mounted on the back of each monitor (or mounted on the back of every other monitor since it has two outputs). Basically no maintenance, easy to expand, and the off-the-shelf solution means easy to upgrade later. Will never fail if a small SSD is used, and has an ethernet hard port and plenty of resources (including 8-32GB of ram). Most monitors already have the necessary mounts.
-Matt
since this is a tour showcase, and these monitors are all presumably providing metrics and alerts to act upon, why not encode the display and simply beam it wherever you want?
https://obsproject.com/index OpenBroadcast project seems to have been designed for this, and would mean instead of a bunch of computers you could just buy smart TV's with embedded android.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Sounds like a nightmare to maintain. At any given time, a handful with just be displaying error messages. You see this in airports, hospitals and conference centers all the time. If it is mostly displaying browser stuff, use an esignage solution. Chromecasts+Greenscreen(a Groupon project) sounds like a good fit. There are also lots of companies that sell a turnkey solution. Ideally, the boxes should be small and really robust. When one fails, a hardware swap with no or minimal software configuration is essential. One can envision netboot or thin client solutions with a management app installed on top, but why bother with that if you really are only looking for something very close to esignage.
Just use a single PC and a matrox card and call it done. HDMI fiber extensions and walk away.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
much better to use virtual desktops, server located somewhere sensible & one (or more) of these per VM
http://www.startech.com/AV/Extenders/VGA/Ethernet-to-VGA-over-IP-Converter~IPUSB2VGA
USB3-to-hdmi works brilliantly if you are mostly showing slow-updating graphics, like network throughput graphs. Get a bunch of extra USB3 ports on a single PC with a PCIE card or 3, and run as many monitors as needed on each USB3 port. If you have certain displays which need to have faster refresh rates you can give them their own USB3 port, and slow-updating stuff can be on higher-contention ports.
usb video devices on a many port usb expander. Less computers, the better!
Shuttle makes fanless VESA-mountable PCs that use the low power Atom CPUs. This would be a great use for them.
Modern app appers know you can app monitors using APPS without LUDDITE PCs! Just app the app on the app, and you'll be able to app apps while apping apps without LUDDITE computers!
Apps!
You have neglected to describe the OS an applications you need to actually run on these displays.
But, if you are content with anything in the range from Rasberry Pi to Intel NUC, why would you want to rack these or use KVM switches? Just mount them 1:1 on the monitors so all you have to wire is power and ethernet. Consider each monitor and attached mini computer as an appliance that gets tasked or serviced as a unit.
Either get something that will be network manageable, like Intel stuff with AMT, or at least one you can set to PXE boot from the LAN so you can trivially re-image them with a power-cycle. Or, like someone else said already, use thin clients and mount them 1:1 on the monitors. But then, you have to manage your fleet of VMs as well as the PXE boot or DHCP extensions to configure the thin clients en masse.
Make each machine drive 8 or more screens. This way if you need to make a huge display of something across multiple screens, you can. One big machine is easier to manage and is smaller than eight small machines.
If it's strictly browser-based, chromecast sticks (not the boxes) should work. Google is advertising that use, no less.
-Bucky
Basically I read this as "we want to have some really cool blinking lights when we walk customers through here, even if none of this stuff actually does anything".
Is this marketing, or actually intended to be functional?
Please tell us you are really going to have people working in this room and monitoring stuff and that this isn't just for show.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The low end ones can be pretty inexpensive, presuming you need something more than what you do with a Raspberry PI. The NUC can run whatever OS you care to run on an Intel platform. The NUC's even have VESA mounting holes/brackets designed to attach to the back of most flat screen TVs
Sounds like you need a video wall controller. You then specify the number of inputs/outputs from it. You can then size monitors/resize/do all sorts of stuff. Several vendors have API's available to take control of the video wall controller via scripts/etc.
What you really need is a digital signage solution to manage the displays. There are lots. Almost all of them are capable of embedding a web page on whatever they describe as a 'layout'. This will give you the advantage of being able to display any other kind of content as well. Now all you need is the smallest stack-able x86 machines you can find, to put in the closet nearest to your displays.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
I have a Pi 2 (1GB ram) running from my generic Full HD Samsung TV USB port. It powers on when my TV powers on, no problem. Same with my old Pi (256 MB ram). The Pi has nothing sucking power though except keyboard, mouse, wired network, HDMI and the micro SD card.
Having done this twice in the past 4 years, my suggestion is to use rack mounted x86 PCs/servers with dual graphics cards. With ATI cards you can go to 8 or 16 monitors per server and as long as you keep a ratio of 1 screen / cpu, you should be fine (capacity wise). Using PCs (a) will allow for easy maintenance and (b) will be easy for others to work on them. PCs are also much easier to upgrade (hardware wise) as they keep the manual effort needed to a minimum. We've done this with PCs and PIs. PIs are a fun project and so far they work well, but you *will* be swearing in the process as you will have to figure out many things, including power, cabling, mounting, etc.
Just get a pile of AMD cards. Doesn't even matter what model they are as long as they're the same generation (and even then AMD's kinda given up on that). It'll make it easier to set them up as one giant monitor, and you won't get frustrated by running into architecture/power issues.
Yeah, sounds like they really need a video wall controller instead of each monitor being independently driven. With a video wall controller you can drive all the monitors from a single controller and then resize 'windows (or inputs)' across the hole thing, in a corner, etc. Each input becomes a window. You can also save layouts/change them according to shift/etc.
With a video wall controller you specify the number of inputs/outputs you need. Many also allow for IP based sources (cameras, remote screens via IP, etc).
You're doing it wrong. What's your manager-of-managers like? What automated ticketing and notification systems do you have?
If it has to look good, what about XI3 computers? https://www.xi3.com/store
If you get a few USB 3.0 video adapters to extend the 3 onboard outputs, it will drive up to 7 monitors.
How about something smaller than Intel's NUC, more powerful, fanless and reasonably cheap. Something like the fitlet for example. And VESA Mountable too.
A pc can drive 12 or more screens. daisy chainable DP screens are the best for cutting cables.
Or you can get 6 head mini DP ati cards with 6 mini dp to hdmi ACTIVE adapters each. a pc with 2 X16 slots even at X8 X8 can drive 12 screens. Maybe even a board with x8/x4/x4/x4 or x4/x4/x4/x4 should work as well to have 32 screens.
an 1150 Xeon (can't use on board video unless it's pci / pci-e based) is cheaper then a i7 and gives you Quad-Core + HT.
I have recently installed a new exhibition on a science center where there are about 90 displays, requiring different levels of user interactivity. There are 7 computers driving those displays, ranging from 8 to 18 /computer. I found that I was more limited by the input devices than by the number of displays.
Hint: check AMD W600 graphic cards. Find a suitable board, stick 3 of 4 of those in it and have fun.
Your requests doesn't mention cost but since you mentioned RP I suspect it's tight. However going cheap isn't always the least cost option. Unless of course your time is worth nothing. I have worked in an environment using ClearCube Blade center PC's doing PCoIP to Zero Clients (No OS on client) and it worked really well. We needed high power systems so we had dedicated blade PC's in a 2U backplane but they offer VDI solutions if your needs are more modest. You basically plug an Ethernet cable (Fiber is also available) and power into the client. The CD9742 is a quad DVI client so it meets your intended use goals.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
8 mini DP per card with 4 that is 31 screens.
From the way this question is worded, I've got a hunch that you just bought common screens for the displays.
Danger, Will Robinson. Ordinary screens aren't rated for 24x7 use, and they WILL burn in over time, among other things. If you're not using screens that are purpose-built for this kind of nonstop usage, you need to back up and change that or it'll all be for nothing.
I'm used to seeing data walls and multi-monitor room displays of this sort designed from soup-to-nuts as a full solution by a service provider that specializes in doing so. There's a reason for the existence of an industry to serve that purpose; it's not as easy as just putting up a lot of big television screens and plugging them into small computers, as you're beginning to discover. Be aware that you almost certainly haven't run into all the problems yet, and it may be cheaper to contract with an outside company to do it all. (I do not work for such a company, just to be up front about it. I'm not stumping for business here.)
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
I would do my job and figure this out myself.
You want to impress people, be sure you can grab & throw what's on one monitor to another, plus pinch & un-pinch with whole arm gestures. For the right age of clients, you may also want to be able to play a few older games on entire walls.
On the one hand you take life too seriously, and on the other, you do not take playful existence seriously enough. Seth
They can set you up with an appropriate technology such as Barco.
W
Get a rack with a locking smoked plexi door. Mount a sheet of pegboard behind the door. Buy some of those Christmas lights that have a controller that runs two dozen different patterns. Set the controller to randomly cycle through all the patterns. Push the lights through the pegboard from the back to form grids and whorls and loops... play with it until it looks cool, then use a dab of removable caulk to secure each one.
Leave it running whenever a tour comes through. You will be asked about this utterly amazing device so many times you'll have to come up with a name for it - we called ours the "Rozhdestvo Photonic Emission Device", and explained that it monitored and visually indicated the presence of voltage on digitally controlled lines.
You could buy a planetarium projection system, so the entire surface of you war room will be the display.
At night, it would show the starry sky, since op centers seldom have windows due to HVAC requirements. Whenever a server crashes a star would fall down from the sky. In case of a system break-in, a supernova would explode. In case of Duqu worm infection, whole galaxies would collide.
Alternatively you could host Hatsune Miku and/or Tupac Shakur "live" hologram concerts in the ops room after work hours.
Eight of which are driven by the ODROID-U3 (the ninth is connected to a cable box via HDMI over ethernet, so the bulky cable box can hide in the server closet and not be susceptible to inadvertent or malicious channel changes).
The ODROID is pretty tiny, has 10/100 ethernet (so no WiFi issues), and is more powerful than the RPi. I 3D printed cases for them that offer adequate ventilation and allow me to just screw it right onto the wall behind the TV. We have two power outlets and a network port behind each TV, so the TV gets one and the ODROID power adapter gets one. Of course the network port goes to the ODROID.
The U3 has been discontinued, so depending on your needs you may want to look at the XU4 (more expensive but significantly more powerful) or the C1+ (cheaper, but a bit less powerful).
We used the Xubuntu install from the preinstalled SD you can get from ODROID, then tweaked it so it auto-starts Firefox in kiosk mode on boot and loads the desired page (and of course set secure root passwords). We also set up X11vnc to allow remote administration, and from there we duplicated the SD cards for each system. After duplication, we set the hostnames and configured the MAC addresses on each one to locally administered addresses (since the ethernet controllers don't have unique addresses) so the DHCP server could assign them fixed addresses.
Yeah, back in my defense-contractor days we built several video walls for connected C&C rooms.
The high-end systems could put multi-display graphics at 1080p60 from any console to the theater and were based around the 64x64 Thinklogical DCS KVM over fiber modems and fed into a VistaSystems Spyder 12x8 video wall controller (of course they have larger units to drive your 3x3 wall, and you'd also be able to have a "preview" scaled down display of the entire wall which is also good for recording or broadcast). This pretty much lets you juggle sources around your video wall like in Minority Report. Good for theater events and presentations, maybe overkill for a 24x7 control room. The advantage was that you could plug literally anything anywhere and compose it on to the video wall somewhere.
Lower-cost systems were built around RGB Spectrum Quadview - type video wall controllers. These weren't as smooth and glitzy, but could get the bits displayed. The main benefit over software systems is you could zoom in and fill the entire wall with one important display, and you wouldn't have silly screen synchronization issues, which are quite noticeable and distracting (particularly when you put on a movie or sports event)
The point is to use the video wall as a cohesive display and not a matrix of disconnected monitors. It sounds like you're trying to build the latter, though. Personally I haven't found any of those types of displays to be very useful to the actual operators in the NOC, they have their own workstations showing everything they need, so I would say the main purpose of such a wall should be the ability to grab a few displays of any of the NOC operators and post them on the wall to allow them to communicate what they see to observers. But since the NOC operators are busy fighting fires, you'd want a separate AV controller station who can pick out the displays that are useful and freeze and post them to the video wall, be able to screenshot and rewind the video feeds to show notable events, reconstruct a timeline of events, etc.
It's possible to cobble something like this on the cheap using VNC (as long as audio and full motion 3D / video are critical) using vncproxy, vncrecorder, xosd (labeling sources is pretty important), and a few other things. This sounds the most like what you're trying to do, but seems like kind of a waste for the central 3x3 matrix wall. Be sure to use one of the "tight encoding" variants of VNC, such as tightvnc, tigervnc, or ultravnc on Win32, since the screenscraping performance really improves latency and frame rate (not enough for FMV, but close). With your thin client solution, you might be able to hack something together using VLC to each display a different part of a movie, but synchronization will be a big issue.
In short, you probably want a video wall solution + matrix switcher to get the full frame rate and all the bits from any source, and plug any half-assed software compositing solution into that. That's the better approach If you want to get any bit of your money's worth out of the big expensive LCD wall.
The NUCs have 4 USB ports so you may want to consider using a USB 3.0 to HDMI/DVI external video card. I have used these with desktop PCs to drive a total of 4-6 screens without adding additional PCIe video cards.
Some Intel NUC models offer displayport 1.2 output. You can chain qty 4 1920x1080 (or 1920x1200) monitors with DP. As for KVM, Avocent has many models, some of which are 32ports or more (KVM over IP). But wondering how this will work because the video outputs are hooked up to monitors, so the KVM will only be used for keyboard & mouse and not video? BTW, this is going to be a heck of a wiring job (power, network, video, other cables). Also take note of power, will need several separate circuits. Which also brings up the question: will be using UPS and generator for backup?. Some commenters suggested virtual servers running virtual desktops with thin clients as endpoints on each monitor, this will work but will be a bit more expensive and harder to implement/manage. Also, unless virtual server infrastructure is redundant (i.e. clustered, etc.), this represents a huge single point of failure. But all of this can be made more redundant if the $$$ is there. Thanks.
as long as your monitors have a USB output for power you can use a Chromecast dongle to drive the displays and there's no extra wiring needed since they have built in wireless. There's an SDK or other ways to get your data to the displays.
I think one CPU per screen is overkill, unless each is going to be it's own discrete Display. A single PC with a bunch of high-end/multi-port display cards would enable you to have a fully-customizable display, rather than 50-60 discrete desktops.
For single cup per display purposes, you could throw a bunch of the Infocus Kangaroo PCs at the problem.
Or, if you really feel you have to throw 50-60 Raspberry Pis at this problem, consider hiring someone to make you a card cage that can hold dozens of RPis in a 2-3U rack chassis, a 20-30 amp 5V power supply shouldn't be that hard to find. (Something similar was done with DEC multias, small, single board Alpha-based computers years ago - difference is, the multia PCB didn't have connectors soldered to every side of the board.
Ken
The math does not add up. If you are going to have dozens of monitors, why are you looking for 30-50 PCs? Why are you looking for quad HDMI video cards?
Why are you letting hardware drive a software decision?
What software are you going to use to monitor? Does it require WINDOWS? Will it support multiple monitors? I would look hard and heavy at those questions before I would start looking at hardware. However, when I did get into the hardware side, as much as I would love a rack full of PCs, the fans and heat and the . . . noise in that room would drive me crazy. I would look to see if I needed an ethernet cable (probably) versus wifi (doubtful) I would look to see if all I need is very thin or thick. If it is thin, then I would look at the Dell (I know!) thin client devices. They are formerly Wyse and those guys KNOW thin clients. This way you can control the software on the server and let the device handle rendering and i/o functions. Yes, some of them support multiple monitors.
I realize that this is for a tour, probably for investors, and you want to make it look super cool. Just don't get suckered into losing functionality to make it look cool for someone.
Like anything PC, 100 Million ways of doing anything... Our solution is an 8 core Windows PC with plenty of power to run multiple programs/feeds, (2) nVidia 810s & a control/configuration program like Ultramon (https://www.realtimesoft.com/ultramon/) to make it easier. A company called ColorGraphic also used to make some massive output cards but I think they went under. Tack on some display interface adapters as needed (for example DisplayPort to HDMI) and "Bob's your uncle". Nice thing is you can mix & match screen combinations but this isn't the only way for doing this either.
Dude,,
do your own research..dont rely on the community to do it for you..
Are you in over your head?
I mean really, i am actually suprised the DHI lets this on here, but then again garbage in garbage out.
Moving past that, check it..
www.infrastructure.org
crestron, extron, Blu die, magnustics, panasonik, Sony, I mean it goes on and on
LCD is the wrong measurement. Pixel is the measurement you want to use. Figure out how many pixels you need to drive, what will be filling those pixels(random stuff from any system monitoring or single feed from one unchanging source) and then go from there.
You are basically designing a glass cockpit. Go read about that and don't bother re-inventing the wheel, just improve on it.
If you want a PC like environment without resorting to custom A/V solutions, check Matrox's current offerings. They were the leader in desktop displays before the 3D revolution, and they're still among the best at driving multiple displays.
Have you considered using a VDI platform, using cheap zero clients to drive the KVM devices?
Longest i spent without sleeping was 3 and a half day, i wasn t even able to drive home by the end of the emergency.
I didn t have a place to reheat food, had to sleep and eat at my desk.
So i'd say : chairs that you can stick together to form a bed, unfoldable armchairs. Fridge, microwave.
An indépendant meeting room maybe built as a vestibule, so managers can go there and ask for updates during crisis and hopefully leave you alone.
These guys actually make computers just for that.
https://www.actineon.com/
It might be the cheapest option with an operating system (ChromeStick only does streaming from what I remember). It can apparently use mouse and keyboard with some modification. It might be worth looking into.
That's pretty much the setup I've done in a control center I had to put together on an icebreaker. 2x3 screens all hooked up to a single-slot ATI card with 6 mini-DP connectors. Works like a charm and the support frame for all the screens handles all the shaking and banging without any issue.
It might be worth considering the Gigabyte BRIX units - there's quite a range, but most of them support dual output (HDMI+VGA or HDMI+MiniDisplayPort). There's one that lists nVidia graphics and triple displays but that might not be worth it; you might also be able to drive dual HDMI with active splitting of the DisplayPort but again, that might not be worth it.
Processors are all over the map from Celeron up to i7.
fencepost
just a little off
Can't believe nobody's asked that yet!
What about the recently announced $99 PC kangaroo?
Get Intel Compute sticks. HDMI, low power and USB. We have 6 monitors each with a stick. We use both Aten USB kvm and or bluetooth for controls.
When we first built ours, we used a server (desktop pc) which had 4 x usb to HDMI converters to run the displays.
We had to make our own code to display tickets, alarms, call queues etc.
When we moved state and closed our old NOC down, we mounted new screens in our location and we the brilliant idea of our CTO, he purchased big TV's with inbuilt android, it does not have to be the best spec, because well, you are looking at screens all day and not the latest home entertainment!
Why? So we can use those screens to power web browsers. Most of our systems were web browser powered and the information held in a data centre connected via VPN. But this can be a central system that does not need to be powerful at all.
I still used one PC originally, this had to power our map of the country, for aesthetics sake. Everything else can be run off the TV itself. This is a mini NUC type PC, before the coined term NUC came into being.
We have expanded to 8, with 2 older tv's with that are not smart, I had to install another mini PC to drive them, but yet again web browser driven.
I would aim for simplicity, if there are programs that need to be run, you can do a mix, but this depends on your systems and company needs.
Full disclosure, I do work for this company (tech side, not sales).
http://userful.com
Sounds like these guys can setup what you've got in mind. You're using zero clients instead small PC's; similar but the zero clients are ASICs rather then general purpose computers. It's all manged and driven by one or two core i7 desktops using a CENTOS 7 derived operating system. Can be driving via USB 2.0 or gigabit network depending on the zero client, and it's capable of driving a 3x3 videowall.
Take a look at the website and if you've got any further questions, drop a line to sales@userful.com.
It comes down to who can interact with it how. Are you doing HD or 4K for the monitors? http://www.brightsign.biz/digi...
We've deployed cubox's (http://solid-run.com/freescale-imx6-family/cubox-i/cubox-i-specifications/) running an X server per device (software is a minimal openadk image). A single 12 core server is running the browsers (about 40-50 firefox instances) and a tiny django site that handles which screen displays what page (or run a different X11 app.).
Not yet managed to get the HW acceleration working but the software FB device has been adequate so far (web pages that refresh every 20-60 seconds), but fancy animations/transitions look horrible.
Given the density of your screens, a single machine with multiple graphics card would probably work best (matrox do an interesting range of cards that might match your requirements).
Check out:
http://www.piwall.co.uk/information/installation
and:
http://dmx.sourceforge.net/
Seriously, one PC for the horsepower then just networked rpi's to create 1 giant screen. who needs KVM when it's just one screen?
depending on the screens you choose the rpi's can easily mount to the back of the monitor, get power from the screen's USB port if it has it, hdmi to the output and the only "wire" you have to manage is the screen power and 1 network cable. Seems simple and scalable.
Make sure to account for heat generation and fan noise. You'll have different cooling needs and can research that fairly easily, but fan noise may need baffling which can affect heat. You don't want visitors to break into a sweat and not hear the person giving the tour. Nor do you want to torture people staffing the NOC.
Surprised nobody has mentioned it.
There are several solutions using X11 to split a virutal screen among slave PCs
E.g. XbigX http://www.x-software.com/en/p...
Atari rules... ermm... ruled.
OP mentioned that the screens are just showing browser windows. USB-attached displays perform surprisingly well for that, and have the advantage of working with any Windows PC. Here's a video showing 4 displays: https://youtu.be/KKcMqCAYkpk And one showing 14: https://youtu.be/heB94f6FHd8 Full disclosure: I work for the company that made these videos. One important thing to note is the 14 monitor demo was done with a pure USB 2.0 system. Modern USB 3.0 systems have lower limits in terms of how many USB devices can be connected and you may not be able to replicate this total number (we have a warning about this in the description and in a pop-up in the video). Another option based on 'mushero' mentioning an ideal solution would be "My dream would be a quad-HDMI device in Chromebox form factor" is the Zotac Magnus EN970 with quad HDMI outputs -> https://www.zotac.com/us/produ... More expensive per display of course compared to our products and not quite as small as a Chromebox, but it is an option nonetheless and we want you have the best solution for your needs, even if doesn't necessarily include our products. Thanks, Bob Plugable Technologies
There are pics here: http://www.bitscope.com/blog/EK/?p=FH10B
MarkT
Hi mushero, we (BitScope) are launching a range of power and mounting solutions for Raspberry Pi next week. They can be used to build racks like this. In this case mounting 20 Raspberry Pis. There's a 40 Pi version and we'll have metalwork available too. We'll update this comment with details upon release.
Why tiny? All those monitors have a huge footprint. Use that footprint by putting things underneath them. Sit your three screen array on a server with the few video cards in it (one per four monitors) and you are not losing any more space.
Power supplies fail, backlights die, but burning in is no longer a thing to worry about with consumer LCDs.
True, it's not a task for newbies with traps for new players but at a small scale it's not all the hard. I've set up a few systems in the backs of trucks with six LCDs - cabling and mounting was the largest hassle and it's pretty easy to put a mid sized tower PC case (or several) behind a sliding panel. With displayport and HDMI the cabling isn't really all that hard either.
Yes it's like shopfitting. An ugly functional thing isn't hard, a nice neat job takes more effort. It just means putting a bit of thought into the design instead of throwing things together. A prime example IMHO in the summary is a constraint of lots of independent little computers to drive displays, which implies either not much thought has gone in or there's something driving that constraint we haven't been told about. There's a lot of ways, especially with X windows, of having a lot of independent displays driven by a single machine, which is going to make life easier than a KVM switch.
For my company's purpose we just use smart TVs, specifically 40" mi TVs for things like netmons/buildmons/stats/etc, and built iframed sites to display different sources of data in a single screen. No external PC to manage and since browser support was the only requirement, works out fine.
I would use VMWare with Zero clients. All the desktops would be virtual - easy to manage, easy to build, easy to change. You can get zero clients that can handle up to 4 monitors and they are relatively inexpensive.
So what’s the need for multiple types of equipment, yes there’s the raspberry pi and many different types of solutions. But what can be the true solution that doesn’t cost the whole budget to be. That is the true question I have seen and have been for years working with virtual platforms but now that we can actually use from the cpu / north bridge / south bridge hardware layers we have a connection to a certain device's we can actually build on but having two or more computers to achieve the same purpose to do the same thing. There is anopen source projects that can utilize certain hardware on one or many virtual machines in one unit to do the same job as one or more tiny or large but expensive units. UnRaid is a virtual hosing platform that can utilize specific hardware in one system to achieve the same with a cluster or many units of equipment.
https://www.ncomputing.com/
Assuming the devices just need to access a web-based monitoring tool or terminal session(s). They use remote desktop sessions to the server end which creates virtual remote desktops for each device. The server allows for viewing the remote session and provides control for remote troubleshooting. The nice thing for the end user is if there are any problems they just flip the power switch off and on. The devices automatically log back in and launch their scripts. It may be more expensive than a custom-built solution but if you want something with 3rd party service and support they work great for us.
(Monty Python reference, for the young.)
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Don't know if it's the best answer but it'd be a fun project. Or just skip the monitors and have everyone wear Oculus Rift headgear.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Have you thought about using Intel Compute Sticks for this? They aren't super powerful, but they're only $99 and can more than handle running a web browser.
I actually liked the Raspberry Pi idea better, but if you want to use Windows for your screens... This option might work.