The ongoing push to drive technology costs pretty much right out of digital signage continues, and now a developer has taken Toronto-based Rise Vision’s free, open source platform and got it running on the ultra low cost Raspberry Pi micro PCs.
The developer has a post on the Rise Forum:
I have a working, full feature RV player on my Pi board using the new Java Rise player. Here is my how-to document I put together for those interested.
Looking forward to everyones feedback and results, some time soon I will be playing around with developing an installer script for this mod/implementation for the Pi board.
I would also stress that although the Pi board is super cheap and a neat option for a player, it’s hardware is not sufficient for anything but the most basic of presentation without much heavy animation or media content, that said, many presentations fall into this category so it’s a good fit for some cases. Also the resolution on the generation 2 Pi board is limited to 1360×768.
That last point is important. The Pi devices were intended for educators and teaching kids computing, and is not really a commercial product. It JUST has the power to work, but JUST. There are other devices that cost a bit more, but offer more power.
That stated, this sort of thing shows a pretty clear path of hardware and software costs heading steadily south for most of the market, save the big enterprise accounts that insist on certain specs and software/server environments.