Dashboard Rotator

First - this is 100% worth the $20.  I submitted a question and within 72 hours he had written a new feature in, plus commented on a solution to a situational problem I was having.  Well done, sir.

Second, this is a voluntary plug; I'm just a happy customer.

We have a glorified PC that has two big ol' Matrox cards, currently powering five 50" TVs around the office via HDMI-ethernet converters.  It's not a great 'video server' solution, but it works (you can't see what's on the remote TVs from in the server room...so WindowsKey+arrows!).

Anyways, each department has their own TV and I'd like to start rotating pages.  We're using Grafana which has a playlist feature, but that's limited to 'on the playlist, not on the playlist' functionality.  We have multiple TVs that need different sets of pages displayed.  Furthermore, we have a pile of other pages to display (simple-nagios-dashboard, kopf ES plugin, Kibana dashboards, etc) that are separate URLs.

I checked into free options - javascript code, browser plugins, standalone apps.  The javascript I didn't really want to get into because I'm not a developer, the plugins almost worked, but had enough issues that things wouldn't work, so had to look at paid options.  (BTW, Revolver was the best of the bunch - but it was Chrome-global, could not deal with different options on different windows)

Dashboard Rotator had some good reviews, so I tested it out.  Seemed to work fine (albeit IE only), so I paid up the $20 and promptly discovered that it couldn't deal with multiple monitors.  So rather than heckle the developer to refund me, I submitted a question explaining my issues.

Well, to my surprise he got back to me and told me he'd look into it.  Sunday night he sent me an updated set of files, and Monday I was testing.  Not only had he enabled the ability to utilize multiple monitors, but had put in Firefox as an option!  Interestingly it uses Selenium - interesting because we're looking at QA automation at work, and Selenium is probably what we're going with.

Anyways, we're now running two instances on the same 'video server' but different monitors and it works perfectly.  The only feature we had to disable was the hourly restart, but the dev seems confident this won't be an issue now that we're using Firefox.


http://www.dashboardrotator.com/

Comments

  1. KeithFebruary 23, 2015 at 8:30 AM

    DisplayFusion will let you see what's on the remote monitors using the "Mirror Monitor" function. You can set a hotkey for it on the Settings > Functions tab. There are also functions for sending a window directly to a specific monitor :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Chris TrotterFebruary 24, 2015 at 3:40 AM

      "Thank You for Purchasing DisplayFusion Pro! You will receive your License Key by email within 24 hours."

      :)

      Delete

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