Under Monitor Displays

The Experience Center at Southampton has 8 x HD Monitors for PQ comparisons. To allow customers to identify and track what content is on each screen we need a solution that allows us to display clearly what is on each monitor. While we could use OSD, these can deteriorate on low bit rate tests. So we have decided to use some under monitor displays. These are 2 Line LCD screens that sit under the monitors and display messages identifying content such as 'MPEG2 SD' or 'Service 1' etc.
While these can be purchased, they can run in to sever thousand £ for each unit. We only require a simple low cost solution, for this we are using LCD displays that we already own (2 x 40 Char displays from RX units that we are scrapping). These displays will be driven from Raspberry Pis, then input for the display messages will be via a web interface to the primary Raspberry Pi.
As the LCD displays are two line, we will use four of these displays, one for each pair of monitors, the upper line for the upper monitor, lower line for the lower monitors. The first Raspberry Pi will run monitors 1 and 2, this Raspberry Pi will also be the master where the web interface to control the displays is running.
The other three Raspberry Pi's will run the remaining monitors, these will talk to the primary Raspberry Pi to see what messaging they need to display.

What this Project Requires

Setting up the Master UMD

Setting up the Slave UMDs

The Python Code

Code Files