Problem:
The school wanted a digital signage system that was visually appealing and required minimal input. Additionally, it was important for staff to easily upload images to the system.
Solution:
I was responsible for designing the digital signage layout across the school. The design included spaces and styling for displaying various useful information for students and teachers, such as time, weather, announcements, upcoming events, and a main slideshow that cycled through other content like lunch menus and news articles. Updating all this content by hand would have been daunting, so I automated the process to make it more efficient.
Impact:
This project set the school up for success with their digital signage system. It has made it easy for the staff to update the content and upload images, ensuring that the system remains up-to-date. This has led to improved engagement of the school with its students and staff. The signage has become a point of interest, with people often stopping to watch it while walking down the hall.
Challenges:
Lunch & Breakfast Menus
The school had purchased digital signs to display the daily cafeteria menus. However, they didn't want the burden of updating another system to fall on the kitchen. The school's website already had the data but didn't have an API. Instead, I tracked down the URL that the website uses to get the menu data within its own pages. From there, I created a program to request that data, create a bulletin, and then use the digital signage's API to publish that bulletin.
News Articles
To keep the news and announcements fresh, I developed a program that serves the news articles from the school's website as an RSS feed that the digital signage can read. The news feed program supplies the four most recent articles and a rotating selection of five images from each article to the digital signage. This means the articles are always up to date, and the content will still change a little, even without new articles.
Staff Image Upload
The school needed a user-friendly and easy-to-use interface to simplify uploading images to their digital signage. To accomplish this, I linked a Google Form with a Google Apps Script project. For each submission, if the user had permission to post, the program used the digital signage's API to upload and publish the content automatically. If the user did not have permission, their response was added to an admin Google Form. The admins were then notified that there was a submission waiting for review.
