Hi Guys, I'm looking to setup a 4 screen display board, nothing highly video intensive just displaying call-wait times, and a few other graphs and information on each screen. Initially I was thinking of 4x Raspberry Pi's, one to the back of each screen however if I could get 1 unit to display over the 4 screens that would be easier to manage. Screens have DVI, HDMI and Display Port interfaces. Any suggestions to a low power unit that can treat all 4 screens as individual screens?
DisplayPort 1.2 supports daisy-chaining monitors. You could buy 4 of these, and associated DP cables. Which have MiniDP input and normal DP output (internal MST which is required for daisy-chaining) Then get one of these, and mount it on the back of one of the montiors. Edit: Sorry, mis-read that you already have screens. You can apparently get an external MST hub for multiple DP monitors, but they aren't easily available atm.
I would get an AMD E350 board (Gigabyte, AsRock, Asus), and grab a low end AMD card (eg 6450 for $35 or so). This will give you 1x HDMI and 1x DVI-D onboard, and 1x HDMI and 1x DVI on the 6450. put that into a small ITX case and you have a low power system that can drive the 4 displays. should be under 20w easy.
Are the screens near to each other? The different cable standards have different ranges (and variable ranges within each cable type, based on equipment used).
Is the information on each ment to be the same? It does make it harder when setting up multiple screens on a single computer when it comes time to display the wanted information on each screen. The PIs might work, but depends on your skills and the program you are wanting to run/display as what ever you install will have to be maintained by someone else eventually. Doing it too hard / cheap / specialized means that once you loose interest / leave, the whole system will get thrown out. If just wanting the same on each, then a image splitter will work fine. If wanting each to be different then you might have to look at having each screen attached to a separate device. Of course, in the end it depends on how you are getting the information to the screens. If the information needs to be read from a special system, accessing that system might determine just what OS your devices will have to use.
Thanks, good looking at other options. I was considering something similar to what you've suggested as an alternative to multiple PI's. The size of the small ITX cases is great, I can mount one up on the wall behind the screens as they're angled down at 30 degrees off the wall so there's space. Yeah, all 4 are right next to each other running in a single row. Looks like a small low power ITX case and setup it is. Having a truss welded up and coated that will hold all 4 screens, with the 30 degrees off the wall i'm going to put a small mounting area for the ITX case and that's problem solved.
