Setting Up Anthias on Raspberry Pi for Digital Signage 🖥️

Introduction ✨

Anthias empowers users to transform any Raspberry Pi into a sophisticated digital signage platform. With its customizable features and intuitive controls, Anthias opens the door to endless possibilities for captivating, informative, and engaging displays. Whether you're showcasing advertisements, announcements, or interactive content, Anthias provides the tools to craft dynamic visual experiences tailored to your needs. This guide will go through the installation, setup and how to use Anthias to discover seamless usage in digital signage management.

Requirements 🛒

• Raspberry Pi Zero/ 3 Model B/ 4 Model B
• Raspberry Pi OS - Bullseye Lite
• SD Card - Class 10
• A Computer to Flash the OS into the SD Card
• Internet Connection / Ethernet is recommended.
• Monitor

Step 1: Setup Raspberry Pi 🍎

In this step, we will install Raspberry Pi OS to the MicroSD card and Connect to Raspberry Pi to boot.

Step 1.1: Download Raspberry Pi Imager Software

Raspberry Pi Imager is a quick and easy way to install Raspberry Pi OS and other operating systems to a microSD card, ready to use with your Raspberry PiYou can download and install Raspberry Pi Imager here. Step 1.2 Connect the Micro-SDCard to the Computer

Next, Connect the SD card to the computer with the help of a Card reader. Step 1.2 Install Raspberry Pi Bullseye Lite on SD Card

1.2.1. Raspberry Pi 3 as Raspberry Pi Device or the one you want to use.

1.2.2. Raspberry Pi OS (Legacy) Lite - Bullseye Lite

1.2.3. Select the Storage - Micro-SD Card

1.2.4. Click NEXT.

1.2.5. Click on the EDIT SETTINGS Option to open the Configuration window.

Here, we can set up the device's Hotspot name, Username, Password and WiFi details. 1.2.6. Enter the Hostname you would like.

1.2.7. Enter a User Name for your Raspberry Pi

1.2.8. Enter a Password for your Raspberry Pi

1.2.9. Enter the WiFi SSID/Name - If you want to use only Ethernet, leave it blank.

1.2.10. Enter the WiFi Password - If you want to use only Ethernet, leave it blank.

Here, you can enable SSH, so that we can access the Raspberry Pi over the network.

1.2.11. Select the "Enable SSH" Option

1.2.12. Click the SAVE to save the configuration.

Finally, Click NEXT.

⚠️ Please note that - All existing data on the "Micro-SD" will be erased, please continue with caution.

After that, please wait and it will take some time to complete the writing and verification.

Step 1.3 Insert the SD card into the Raspberry Pi and Connect HDMI for the monitor and the power.

1.3.1. Insert the SD card

1.3.2. Connect HDMI

1.3.3. Connect Ethernet (Optional) Or leave it if you want to set it up over WiFi.

1.3.4. Finally, Boot the device by connecting the power.

Step 2: Install Anthias 🐟

Here, we will install the Anthias on RPi over SSH. Once you power the device you can see the log going over the screen.

2.1 Boot Raspberry Pi

Connected power and Wait a few seconds; you will see a login prompt. You can log in with the help of the keyboard - Enter the Username and password you gave in steps 1.2.7 and 1.28.

You can connect to the Raspberry Pi over the network and access the shell using SSH. For that, first, we need to get the IP address. You can find that by checking the router setting or using any Local IP scanning device - Make sure your computer and the Raspberry Pi are on the same network for that.

2.2 SSH to Raspberry Pi (Not mandatory )

Open your favourite computer shell - Powershell/Terminal and Enter

ssh pi@<IP Address>

Here, my Raspberry Pi IP address is 192.168.0.244 and run the command for SSH and enter the password.

Now, I'm in the Raspberry Pi Shell as we configure Raspberry Pi successfully.

2.3 Install Anthias

Either you can SSH or you can use a keyboard connected to Raspberry Pi and then copy the command and paste it to the terminal to initiate the installation.

bash <(curl -sL https://install-anthias.srly.io)

After running the script, you can see a prompt like below.

Here, you need to use the keyboard to give inputs, If it's SSH you can use your computer keyboard or you can use a USB keyboard connected to the RPi. There will be three questions. 1.Do you still want to continue? (Y/N)

Press Y and hit ENTER.

2.Do you want Anthias to manage your network? This is recommended for most users because this adds features to manage your network. (Y/n)

If you are using only WiFi, then Press N as the network manager will update on the go and it will interrupt the connection if you are connected via SSH. If you are using ethernet then Press Y.

3.Would you like to perform a full system upgrade as well?(Y/N)

It will do a system upgrade and it's not mandatory, You can either choose Y or N depending on your internet bandwidth.

After these prompts and answers, the installation will start.

The installation normally takes 15-30 minutes. On a Raspberry Pi Zero or Raspberry Pi Model B with a class 4 SD card, the installation will take hours.

Once the installation is done, there will be an attempt to reboot the Raspberry Pi to start the Anthias.

If everything goes correctly, You can see the Anthias dashboard page IP address listed on the TV/Monitor the Raspberry Pi connected.

Step 3: Setup Anthias ✨

Open the browser in your computer that is connected to the same network as the Raspberry Pi and enter the IP address mentioned on the TV/Monitor screen to access the dashboard.

here, you can add new assets, and prioritise and schedule the assets. We can see how to do that one by one.

To add new assets like images, videos, and document links click on the"Add Asset" button.

On the following page, you can give the URL to the asset. That can be a YouTube video, image link, document link..etc or using the Upload option, you can add assets from the computer without an internet connection.

Once added, you can click Save and you can see - that Anthias will check the asset's compatibility once it's done it will added to the assets directly.

When you add a new asset, by default it will be disabled state and you need to manually enable it by toggling the switch under the Activity.

We can also modify/edit an asset after adding, we can change the parameters such as the time it should need to play, the duration of the asset

Play for - what time it should play - like forever or only one time or every Monday or specific dates..etc

Duration - Asset duration - It will be useful if we have multiple assets running and we can configure how much time each asset should be visible on screen.

This way we can add multiple assets, manage them via the network and schedule their visibility.

Once we save the settings, we can see the assets started playing on the screen, we can also add interactive sites like live dashboards.

Congratulations 🥳 we have now set up and run Anthias on Raspberry Pi.

We can also read the System information under the "System Info", "Free Space" (Storage), Memory(RAM), Uptime, Monitor Info, Pi model, Anthias Version..etc will displayed here.

By default, the Audio out will be over HDMI, but we can change the Audio output via Raspberry Pi 3.5mm Audio Jack under the "Audio Output" from the Settings tab.

Similarly, we can change the Date format, Authentication, Shuffle playlist (override the default order and randomly select assets), Debug logging and more.

In the Open source world, communities are very important and Anthias has a nice community forum, where we can ask questions and share feedback, do check it out if you need any support. It's managed by Screenly.io

Thank you for reading the documentation, please feel free to share your feedback and reach out to the Anthias forum if you need any support.