help Help

Real-time IoT & Smart Power

Your signs are no longer just signs.
They run the room.

A single Raspberry Pi can play your content and control the lights, the TV power, the door sensor, the temperature gauge, the rotary knob, the emergency button, the multi-room speakers, the KNX backbone, the factory PLC… all configured visually from your browser. No extra hub. No cloud middleware. No code.

Start FREE  → About the Pi player

7
Wireless & wired protocols
2,000+
Auto-recognized Zigbee devices
~98%
Power savings (BIOS shutdown)
$0
Software cost — ever
72% ZIGBEE KNOB HEOS E-STOP MOTION HDMI-CEC RASPBERRY PI 5
How it works

Sense → Decide → Act

Every signage screen becomes the brain of the room. Sensors feed it data, your scene rules decide what happens, and it controls real devices in return.

01

Sense the world

Motion, temperature, humidity, light, contact, illuminance, smoke, water leak, button press, RFID badge, knob turn, BLE beacon, KNX presence detector, factory production counter — all stream into the player in real time.

02

Decide visually

Drag-and-drop scene events in SignStudio. Wire a button press to a scene change. A motion sensor to a video. A temperature reading to an animated gauge. A schedule to a TV power command. Zero code, zero scripting.

03

Act on the room

Switch a Zigbee bulb. Dim a KNX light. Power a TV on or off via HDMI-CEC. Pulse a relay through GPIO. Crank a HEOS speaker volume. Send a command to a factory PLC over RS-485. Forward an event to a third-party dashboard.

Out of the box

Seven protocols. One little device.

The same Raspberry Pi that plays your content also speaks every wireless and wired language your hardware uses — without any extra hub, dongle bundle, or middleware.

Zigbee 3.0

Smart bulbs & sensors mesh

A single $30 Sonoff dongle plugged into the Pi handles your entire Zigbee mesh. Auto-discovers IKEA, Philips Hue, Aqara, Tuya, Sonoff. 2,000+ devices recognized.

KNXnet/IP

Building automation

Auto-finds your KNX gateway on the LAN. Lights, blinds, HVAC zones, dimmers, presence detectors, energy meters — the entire commercial-building backbone, one screen.

Bluetooth LE

Phones, beacons, fitness

Built-in BT 5.0 on Pi 5. Scan, pair, read & write GATT characteristics, subscribe to notifications. Watch-mode auto-reconnects when devices come back in range.

HDMI-CEC

Real TV power control

Physically powers TVs off & on through the HDMI cable. Samsung Anynet+, LG SimpLink, Sony BRAVIA Sync, Hisense, TCL, Google TV, Android TV, Philips. Falls back to signal-toggle on dumb monitors.

GPIO + PWM + DHT

Direct hardware wiring

Buttons, relays, LEDs, motors, opto-isolators, pumps, DHT11/DHT22 temperature/humidity sensors — soldered or jumped straight into the Pi's pins. Hardware PWM at up to 100 kHz.

Denon HEOS

Multi-room audio

Auto-discovers Denon & Marantz HEOS speakers on the LAN. Background music, ambient lobby sound, PA-style announcements triggered by scene events.

RS-232 / RS-485

Industrial & legacy gear

Talk to factory PLCs, projector controllers (PJLink), lab instruments, RFID/barcode readers, weight scales, thermal printers — anything with a serial protocol.

WebSocket + HTTP API

Plug in anything else

Voice assistants, building-management software, Home Assistant, Node-RED, custom mobile apps, IFTTT — subscribe to any sensor in real time over /iot/ws.

Real hardware

This isn't a render. It's a working setup.

A Raspberry Pi 5, a Sonoff Zigbee dongle, a fistful of sensors and bulbs — sitting on the bench, paired in under five minutes, sending live events into Studio.

Live IoT Hub Raspberry Pi 5 IoT hub with Zigbee dongle and sensors

The whole stack on one board.

One Raspberry Pi runs the SignPlayer, the Chromium kiosk, the Zigbee coordinator (via the Sonoff dongle), the BLE radio, the GPIO loop, the KNX gateway client, the HEOS discovery, and the WebSocket bus — simultaneously. No second device. No external hub. No cloud middleware.

  • Sonoff ZBDongle-E (~$30) on USB — runs the entire Zigbee mesh
  • Built-in BT 5.0 handles every BLE peripheral
  • 40 GPIO pins for direct hardware (relays, buttons, sensors)
  • HDMI-CEC controls TV power without an IR blaster

Plug, pair, done.

The first time you plug a Zigbee bulb, an Aqara motion sensor, a temperature probe, or a button into the mesh, it pops up in Studio with the right manufacturer, model, and a full capability list pulled from a database of 2,000+ supported devices. You name the eventName and you're wiring scenes thirty seconds later.

  • Auto-detection — no manual addressing or pairing tables
  • Survives reboots, USB hot-unplugs, and OS updates
  • Battery levels, link quality, signal RSSI all in Studio
  • Same model for any new device added later — configuration, not engineering
Paired devices Zigbee paired devices and sensors live in Studio
Hardware support

If it's smart, you can wire it up.

An incomplete tour of what you can plug into a single Pi running our signage. Auto-discovered, auto-named, auto-configured.

💡
Smart bulbs

IKEA Tradfri, Philips Hue, Tuya, Aqara, Sonoff — on/off, dimming, color, color temperature.

🚶
Motion sensors

Aqara P1, Tuya, Hue Motion, IKEA Vallhorn — auto-IAS-Zone enrollment, no manual setup.

🌡
Climate sensors

DHT22, BME280, Aqara, Xiaomi LYWSD — live temperature, humidity, pressure feeds.

🔐
Door & window contacts

Aqara, Sonoff DW2, IKEA Parasoll — instant open/closed events into your scenes.

🔔
Buttons & remotes

Aqara Opple, Tuya buttons, IKEA STYRBAR, TRÅDFRI — one-shot triggers anywhere.

🔄
Rotary knobs

Lutron, IKEA Symfonisk, custom encoders — continuous values for volume, brightness, setpoints.

🔌
Smart switches & relays

Sonoff Mini, Aqara wall switches, KNX outputs, generic Zigbee relays.

🔥
Smoke / leak / CO₂

Any Zigbee IAS-Zone safety sensor — instant emergency cutover on every screen.

📺
TVs & monitors

Real CEC power off, real input switch on wake. Works on every major brand and falls back gracefully.

🔊
HEOS speakers

Denon, Marantz, HEOS-equipped — play, pause, volume, mute, multi-zone.

🎖
RFID / NFC readers

RC522 over SPI, USB readers — badge-in identification, inventory, access control.

🏭
Industrial PLCs

Modbus, PJLink, custom binary — via RS-232 or RS-485 USB dongle.

⚙️
Motors & servos

Hardware PWM up to 100 kHz, four channels, smooth duty-cycle changes.

📱
BLE phones & wearables

Watch-mode auto-reconnect — presence-aware content for staff & trusted devices.

🏠
KNX backbones

Lights, blinds, HVAC, presence, energy meters — via any KNXnet/IP gateway already on the LAN.

🛡️
Custom hardware

Anything with a serial protocol or HTTP webhook plugs into the same event bus as the rest.

Where it kicks ass

Real installations, real impact.

The same platform plays a 4K video and stops a production line, dims the lobby lights, scans a maintenance badge, and powers off forty TVs at midnight.

🏭 Factory production line

A Zigbee counter on the conveyor belt feeds live unit counts to the floor's wall display. Color flips green → amber → red as the shift falls behind quota. A KNX presence detector on the safety gate publishes an event to the Manager dashboard back at HQ.

counter → SignIot → liveGauge → scene + manager dashboard

🛑 Emergency stop & evacuation

A big red mushroom button wired to a Pi GPIO pin. One press fires eStop:true — every screen on every floor instantly switches to the evacuation map, an HEOS announcement plays through the building's speakers, the TV brightness ramps to maximum, the BMS gets a webhook.

GPIO 17 RISING → eStop → all_displays:emergency_scene

🤖 AI & collaborative robotics

Cobot status pulses over RS-485. The shop-floor screen shows a real-time digital twin: green for "running", amber for "low feedstock", red for "fault". An AI-generated technician guide pops up automatically on fault — with the part number pulled from the cobot's diagnostic frame.

RS-485 status frame → SignIot → aiGenerate(scene)

🏪 Smart retail welcome

A motion sensor at the entrance fires customerEntered:true. Ambient content fades to a personalized "Welcome — today's special: 20% off". Foot traffic counter ticks up. Outside business hours the same event wakes the TV from CEC standby.

motion → customerEntered → welcome_scene + analytics

🏥 Hospital wait-board

The patient's wristband BLE beacon is detected at triage. Their queue position appears on the lobby board within 200 ms. A door-contact sensor on Exam Room 4 publishes examRoom4:occupied — the room status indicator flips red without anyone touching a button.

BLE beacon + contact → queue + room_status

🏨 Hotel lobby + KNX

At sunset, a KNX presence sensor fires. Lobby lights ramp warm, a HEOS speaker plays softer ambient, the digital concierge screen switches from daytime promos to evening dining options. A rotary knob at reception lets the night clerk override the brightness directly.

KNX dusk → light + audio + scene

🍳 Restaurant compliance & nights-off

A DHT22 in the prep area logs temperature every 30 s. If it crosses the safe threshold, the kitchen menu board flashes a warning + a webhook fires to the manager. At 23:00 every day, every TV in the venue powers off via CEC and the Pi itself shuts down — ~98% energy saved overnight, auto-wakes at 09:00.

DHT22 + RTC alarm → compliance + power_save

🏭 Museum interactive exhibit

A proximity sensor under the plinth detects an approaching visitor. The exhibit screen wakes from screensaver and starts an introduction video. A lingering visitor (pressure sensor) triggers the deeper "tell me more" content with audio guide cues over HEOS.

proximity → scene_intro → scene_deep
Power management

Cut your signage power bill by 40–98%.

Every signage CMS draws content. Almost none of them turn the screen off. We do — two ways — with hardware-grade reliability.

Mode 1 — Monitor sleep

EVERYDAY

The TV physically powers off via HDMI-CEC during off-hours; the player itself stays online so content reload is instant when the screen wakes. Works on every major brand — Samsung Anynet+, LG SimpLink, Sony BRAVIA Sync, Hisense, TCL, Google TV.

60–90%
screen-power reduction during off-hours
Plus longer panel life and zero OLED burn-in.
  • Per-day on/off times (different schedule for Mon–Fri vs. weekends)
  • Real CEC power-off, not just blanking
  • Falls back to HDMI signal-toggle on TVs with CEC disabled
  • Google TV input-switch on wake handled automatically
Hardware: none required. Any HDMI display, CEC recommended.

Mode 2 — BIOS shutdown

MAX SAVING

At off-time the player arms its on-board RTC alarm and powers completely down. CPU off, RAM off, storage off, screen off — only the RTC chip stays alive on a coin cell. At wake-time the alarm fires and the player boots itself. Content resumes in ~60 s.

~98%
total system energy reduction
Critical for solar/battery installs and outdoor signage.
  • Self-wakes at the next scheduled on-time — no smart plug, no wall timer
  • Stale-schedule guard: never acts on out-of-date data after long sleeps
  • Manual override from Studio survives until the next boundary
  • Surfaces battery health in Studio — gates the option if hardware can't support it
Hardware: Raspberry Pi 5 with CR2032 on the J5 RTC header (or any Linux box with working /sys/class/rtc/rtc0/wakealarm).
Schedule UI

Two views, one schedule.

Drag the green start handle and amber end handle on a visual slider, or type the times directly in HH:MM fields — whichever feels faster. Per day independence: Mon–Fri 7am–10pm, Sat 9am–11pm, Sunday closed. Overnight schedules wrap automatically. 15-minute snap, 1-minute precision with Shift.

  • Green = on / start — consistent everywhere in the UI
  • Amber = off / end — same color in slider, inputs, and labels
  • Mid-day schedule edits apply today, not tomorrow
  • Keyboard accessible: Tab through handles, arrow keys to nudge
MON
07:00–22:00
TUE
07:00–22:00
WED
07:00–22:00
THU
07:00–22:00
FRI
07:00–23:00
SAT
09:00–23:00
SUN
—
0006121824
Self-maintaining fleet

Set it. Forget it. Watch it run.

Daily auto-restart, MAC visibility, station start time, mid-day schedule re-arms — everything that keeps a fleet of hundreds of screens running without on-site visits.

🔄

Daily reboot

Off / Soft / Hard. Soft kills just the Chromium PWA (~10 s recovery). Hard reboots the whole device (~60 s). Mid-day edits apply today.

📧

MAC address visibility

Every station's MAC shown in Studio. IT can correlate to DHCP leases, switch ports, firewall rules — without ever logging into the device.

⏲️

Station start time

See when each player last came online. Spot misbehaving devices, verify deployments, audit fleet uptime — right in the device list.

📊

Live system stats

CPU, RAM, disk, temperature, WiFi signal, network throughput, OS version — broadcast every 60 s. No SSH, no extra monitoring tools.

📷

Remote screenshot

One click in Studio captures what any screen is currently showing. Works on Wayland, X11, GNOME, and Windows. Use it for sales walls, support, or QA.

🔌

Auto-update everything

SignService binary, IoT dependencies, Zigbee2MQTT, screen-capture tools — checked on every boot, upgraded silently. Install once, never visit again.

🌙

Memory-threshold safety

Optional safeguard: if RAM crosses a configured threshold, soft- or hard-restart automatically. Catches runaway leaks before they become an outage.

🚀

Survives reconnects

All paired devices, eventName mappings, schedules — persisted in the database. Reflash a player, plug it in — everything re-pushes itself in seconds.

The event system

One name connects everything.

You name a Zigbee bulb's on/off capability kitchenLight. Now any scene component, any other device, and any external system can read or fire that event — same name, same value, same flow.

📱
Device fires

button / sensor / KNX bus / RFID tap

→
🔌
SignIot publishes

{ eventName, value }

→
🎲
Scene reacts

component bound to eventName

↱ also forwarded to…
💬
Voice assistant
🏢
Building management
📈
Custom dashboard
🛡️
Third-party app
Subscribe externally
$ wscat -c wss://<player>:8090/iot/ws
> { "command": "registerEvent", "eventName": "lobbyMotion" }
< { "command": "eventDispatch", "eventName": "lobbyMotion", "value": "true", "timestamp": ... }
Race-free reconnect. The client keeps its own subscription set; on any disruption it just re-registers everything — stateless on the server, durable on the client.
From a single browser

One dashboard. Every screen. Every device.

SignStudio is the source of truth for both your content and your hardware. No SSH, no log files, no config files, no on-site debugging for routine work.

SignStudio — Players › Lobby Display 4 › IoT
Content Schedule IoT Power Reboots Device
Paired devices — 7 online
💡
kitchenLight · IKEA Tradfri E27 RGB
eventName: kitchenLight · LQI 248 · Zigbee
ON
🚶
lobbyMotion · Aqara P1 PIR
eventName: lobbyMotion · battery 84% · Zigbee
ACTIVE
🏠
entranceDimmer · KNX 1/2/45 (DPT 5.001)
eventName: entranceDimmer · gateway: Gira X1 · KNXnet/IP
62%
🔔
eStopButton · GPIO 17 input_pullup
eventName: eStop · debounce 50ms · GPIO
IDLE
🌡
kitchenTemp · DHT22 on GPIO 4
eventName: kitchenTemp · poll 30s · GPIO+DHT
22.4°C
🔊
lobbySpeaker · Denon HEOS 5
eventName: lobbyVolume · multi-room · HEOS
VOL 35
📺
Display TV · LG OLED55C2 (SimpLink)
CEC physical 1.0.0.0 · Active Source ack · HDMI-CEC
ON
Platform support

Works on the hardware you already trust.

Optimized for Raspberry Pi 5 with full feature support, but everything works on x86 mini-PCs and Linux SBCs too.

Platform Monitor sleep BIOS shutdown Daily reboot Zigbee / BLE / KNX / GPIO MAC + start time
Raspberry Pi 5 (Pi OS Bookworm/Trixie) ✓ ✓ (CR2032) ✓ ✓ all ✓
Raspberry Pi 4 (Pi OS) ✓ limited ✓ ✓ all ✓
Ubuntu / Debian (x86 mini-PC, SBC) ✓ ✓ (RTC) ✓ ✓ all ✓
Windows ✓ (signal) — ✓ ✓ (BLE, partial GPIO) ✓
What sets us apart

Why this beats every other signage CMS.

Most signage software treats the screen as a passive display. Ours treats it as the brain of the room. That changes everything.

🏠

One device per location

No separate Zigbee hub, no extra KNX controller, no IR blaster, no industrial gateway. The signage player is the brain.

🎮

Configured in a browser

Studio is the single source of truth for content and hardware. Drag, drop, save. No SSH, no config files, no firmware flashing.

🛡️

Survives the real world

Network blips, dongle hot-unplugs, OS updates, mid-schedule edits, fast reboots that race the schedule — every failure mode is engineered for.

📊

Visible & auditable

Every device, every event, every sensor reading flows up to Studio in real time. Every transition logged. No black boxes.

💰

Pay once, scale forever

Adding a second IoT device, or a thousandth, is configuration — not engineering. The protocols and the hub are already there.

🔌

Open at the edge

Stable WebSocket and HTTP APIs. Voice assistants, BMS, mobile apps, Home Assistant, Node-RED — all plug in cleanly with the same eventName model.

🌙

Energy-conscious by default

Mode-1 monitor sleep cuts screen power 60–90%. Mode-2 BIOS shutdown cuts the entire device's energy ~98%. Out of the box.

🔗

Works with what you have

Existing KNX backbone, the TVs already on the wall, off-the-shelf Zigbee bulbs, legacy serial gear. No rip-and-replace.

40–98%
power savings
2–3×
longer display life
~$30
Zigbee dongle — covers everything
$0
monthly IoT platform fees
Get going in minutes

From zero to smart room.

Five steps. No configuration files. No firmware flashing. The most technical thing you'll do is plug in a USB dongle.

1
Install

Boot Raspberry Pi OS, run sudo bash install.sh. The installer handles SignService, SignIot, Docker, all dependencies.

2
Plug in dongle

Plug a Sonoff ZBDongle-E (~$30) into a USB port. Auto-detected, auto-configured. Move it later — by-id path keeps working.

3
Open Studio

Pair the player with the install code shown on screen. Open Players › IoT and start pairing devices.

4
Wire scenes

Drag the Bulb / Knob / Gauge / Indicator components onto a scene. Pick eventNames. Save. That's it.

5
Schedule power

Set on/off times under Power. Choose Monitor Sleep or BIOS Shutdown mode. The fleet runs unattended forever.

Turn every screen into the brain of the room.

Free signage software. Free IoT platform. Real device control. Real power savings. Real ROI — from day one.

Start FREE → About the Raspberry Pi player

Start | Login

live examples, see it in action

Checkout live examples of Digital Signage presentations. The SignPlayer can run everywhere, on Android, Windows, Mac, iPad and even inside your web browser

View More

product pricing

Find out why people call us “the world’s most popular digital signage platform”

View More

customers

Can it really be free?
What’s the catch?
Want to be amazed?
Read on...

View More