Raspberry Pi Narrowcasting
A cheap, simple and effective way to equip your existing displays with powerful narrowcasting functionalities.
Lumicast offers several options to turn a Raspberry Pi into a narrowcasting player. From our experience, these devices are more than sufficient for the majority of narrowcasting needs.
What is Raspberry Pi narrowcasting?
What is a Raspberry Pi?
A Raspberry Pi is a small computer with surprising capabilities. Since 2012 there have been multiple iterations of this devices, incrementally improving its performance, while remaining at a low price point. At this moment you can get the latest model of Raspberry Pi, the Raspberry Pi 5, for around €70. In a box with a length of 10cm, width of 5cm and a depth of 3cm there is the device with all kinds of available ports, like USB, ethernet and (micro)HDMI.
Narrowcasting on the Raspberry Pi
Thanks to the impressive specifications which the developers of the Raspberry Pi have managed to fit into a small device, it is very well suited for serving as a player for a narrowcasting installation. After intensively testing and improving the Lumicast Player on Raspberry Pi, we can confidently say it will be the perfect solution for the majority of narrowcasting purposes. Installing the Lumicast Player software onto a Raspberry Pi is also extremely easy. You can download our pre-built operating system image and install it onto your SD card, making it plug-and-play afterwards. If you want to, you can also manually download our player and install it in the way you like on your Pi.
By choosing a yearly subscription, you can now get a free Lumicast Pixie player, based on Raspberry Pi!
Advantages of a Raspberry Pi as a narrowcasting player
Reliable
A Raspberry Pi is a reliable device and will be able to show your content 24/7 with ease.
Efficient
A Raspberry Pi does not use a lot of power, which is better for the environment and your energy bill!
Cheap
If you already have displays that have no smart capabilities, you can use Raspberry Pi to make them smart, meaning you can keep using your existing displays.
Compact
Because the Pi is small, you can easily hide it behind a display.
Smooth remote management
Many businesses do have some kind of display with images or a powerpoint presentation that is uploaded via for example a USB stick. While this may work in some cases, we have seen that this eventually gets problematic. It will be hard to keep the content up-to-date because the barrier to do so is high, since you have to physically go to each display to update it. This gets even harder when you are starting to use more displays in different locations.
Lumicast + Raspberry Pi is the solution
By mounting a Raspberry Pi player behind every display and equipping them with Lumicast, adjusting your content will become easier than ever before. See changes in real-time on every display. Apart from that, Lumicast enables you to show a lot more different content than you were able to show before, through apps. This allows you to for example show actual news reports or weather information.
Experience the simplicity of Lumicast yourself
Supported Raspberry Pi models
Lumicast offers an OS image in which all required parts for the Lumicast Player including the player itself are already installed. when installing this image and running it on your Pi, you will see Lumicast come up right after your Pi has booted up. This OS image works for the following Raspberry Pi models:
- Raspberry Pi 3 A/B(+)
- Raspberry Pi 4 B
- Raspberry Pi 400
- Raspberry Pi 5
We also offer an AppImage for Linux ARM64 and Linux ARMv7l. These allow you to manually set up a Raspberry Pi, allowing you to potentially make the player work on different models too.
Installing Lumicast onto a Raspberry Pi
Via an OS image (easy)
Check the article in our helpdesk.
Via AppImage (advanced)
Check the article in our helpdesk.