Try our simple balenaCloud starter project to set up a Raspberry Pi and LCD or monitor to display any webpage or web-based dashboard. We’re creatively calling it balenaDash! Follow along with our guide to get up and running in under 30 minutes.
This is the perfect introductory project to try out balenaCloud and see how everything works.
At the most basic level, this project allows you to display any webpage using a lightweight web browser. This means that you can build a device dedicated to showing anything that runs in a normal web browser, it will boot up and automatically start displaying what you choose.
Some examples of what you could use this for include:
- Instagram photo stream (based on hashtag or user)
- Data-centric dashboards using Grafana or Datadog
- Live digital photo frame feeding from Google Photos
- Display for services such as Flightradar24 or Flightaware
- Digital fishtank or jellyfish
- Streaming webcam display
- 24 hour live animated cat display
- Home automation dashboard
We’ve partnered with our friends at PiSupply to make it easy for you to get ahold of all the hardware you need to build this project in a single package. We’ve created two packages, one that includes everything you’ll need, and a second that includes everything apart from the display for if you’ve already got a monitor you want to use.
The list of items you’ll need is also included below:
- Raspberry Pi 3B
- 16GB Micro-SD Card (we recommend Sandisk Extreme Pro SD cards)
- Display (any Raspberry Pi display will work for this project)
- Micro-USB cable
- Power supply
- Case (optional)
To use automatic backlight switching you’ll need to configure a few service variables for the scheduler service.
ENABLE_BACKLIGHT_TIMER=1
BACKLIGHT_ON=0 8 * * *
BACKLIGHT_OFF=0 23 * * *
The BACKLIGHT_ON and BACKLIGHT_OFF variables accept standard cron syntax; take a look at https://crontab.guru if you’re not familiar. For more instructions check out our blog post.