This was a sub-contract done for Francomedia and State of the Arts. The client was Safeway Canada. They originally wanted three display screens for one of their stores that would sit behind the customer service desk and display ads for programs that they had running.
I was the lead on the hardware, software, networking, and scheduling. The ads were provided. Sheldon, from State of the Arts, provided the interface to upload and schedule the ads on a public website. So all the screens would be controlled from any computer that had Internet access. This was sweet! Now just need hardware that could be scheduled to turn on, check the site for new ads, play ads, and check for new ads..., then at the end of the day shut off the hardware.
Because of security concerns Safeway did not want grant any access to their network. We put in a wireless bridge (end up being a Rogers mobile internet device) that connected to a switch and split to the device that sent commands to the TV (on, off, disable buttons, etc) and to the computer (ASUS Ebox). We went with an Asus eBox because of the low power consuption, HDMI out, builtin ethernet and slim design.
The box was running Ubuntu flavour of Linux that booted up, opened Firefox in a full screen and loaded the local Flash file. I developed a Flash program that checked in with the webservice, downloaded the ads, cached the ads, played each ad, after playing all the ads, it checks again for updates and plays the ads. The Flash development was done in Flash CS3 with actionscript 2.0.
Here is the demo running in my living room:
Here is the network diagram that we started off with:
