Raspberry Pi digital signage with Festaboard

Festaboard is a browser web app, so the only job the Pi has is to open a URL in Chromium and leave it there. There is nothing to install, no player software to license, and no subscription. A Raspberry Pi draws a few watts, runs silent with no fan on the smaller boards, and can sit behind a screen for months.

The board runs across the full Pi range, from a Pi 3A with 512MB of RAM up to a Pi 5, and on RK3568-based Android displays that ship with Chromium. That means you can reuse an old Pi as a low-power signage player instead of buying a dedicated media box.

Build your board on festaboard.com first: type your message, set colors and a theme, and save any extra slides you want to rotate. Then open sharing and toggle the public share link on. You get a read-only URL in the form festaboard.com/b/<token> that anyone can open with no account, which is exactly what the Pi needs.

Append ?kiosk=1 to that URL to get the display build: no site chrome, sound off by default, low-motion animation, and a screen Wake Lock so the panel never sleeps. On the Pi, launch Chromium pointed at that URL in kiosk mode. On current Raspberry Pi OS the command is chromium --kiosk "https://festaboard.com/b/<token>?kiosk=1"; on older images the binary is chromium-browser. Add --noerrordialogs --disable-infobars --incognito to keep the screen clean across reboots.

Once it is running you do not touch the Pi again. Edit the board from your dashboard on any device and the change pushes to the screen in about a second with no reload, and if the tab is hidden for a long stretch the kiosk view auto-reloads to recover on its own.

The flip animation is the one thing that taxes a small board, so Festaboard exposes it as a URL parameter you can dial to the hardware. Use ?anim=full for the complete split-flap animation on a Pi 4 or Pi 5, ?anim=lite for fewer steps (the default inside kiosk mode), and ?anim=off on a Pi 3A or other 512MB device so text swaps instantly with zero animation. The board also respects the OS prefers-reduced-motion setting automatically.

For a 4K panel driven by a Pi, text can render very small at native resolution. Add --force-device-scale-factor=2 to the Chromium command to scale the whole board up so the 6x22 grid fills the screen and stays readable from across a room. A full kiosk line for a 4K Pi 3A might read chromium --kiosk --force-device-scale-factor=2 "https://festaboard.com/b/<token>?kiosk=1&anim=off".

Every board is the same layout as a physical Vestaboard: 6 rows by 22 columns, 132 character tiles. You can set per-cell color tiles in white, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple, pick a theme (Classic Amber, Terminal Green, Clean White, Cool Blue, or Warm Red), and write any custom message.

Two live integrations work today. The Clock shows live time, day, and date in 12 or 24 hour format and updates itself, which makes a Pi a decent always-on lobby or desk display. TrustMRR pulls live MRR, growth percent, and customer count from your SaaS via a slug, so an office screen can track revenue. Weather, Crypto, Spotify, Home Assistant, Google Calendar, Countdown, and Datafast are listed as coming soon and are not available yet.

In fullscreen you can rotate between your main board and saved slides on an interval you choose, from 5 minutes up to 120 minutes. That lets one Pi cycle a welcome message, a metric, and the clock without any scripting.

Kiosk mode is built for screens no one is standing next to. It holds a screen Wake Lock so the display does not blank, keeps sound off by default, and pushes edits live so you never have to reload. If the browser tab gets hidden for a long time, the view auto-reloads to bring the board back.

Festaboard is also installable as a PWA through Add to Home Screen, since it ships a web manifest, if you would rather launch it that way on a tablet or Android display. Sign-in for editing uses an email and a one-time code, so there is no password to store on a wall-mounted device.