The noticeboard 'player' software that runs on this unit is available as a separate item to run on your own PC hardware. We offer the NDD1 product as some customers require a very small, ready to run unit that is cheap to run due to its typical power consumption of about 30 Watts. This unit has the NDD1 player software pre installed. All you need to do is connect the unit to your network!
Our NDD1 Player application has been throughly tested with the Microsoft Vista operating system and we have found no operating issues.
NDD1 - Network Display Device
NDD units are the devices that connect to your noticeboard screens. You can have a system based on one unit or many units, all that is required is a network connection between the NDD unit and the PC used as the controller.
Featuring a 1.6GHz Intel Atom CPU the units are capable of full multimedia playback along with normal message displays. The unit also supports the digital poster 'portrait' mode of display, allowing you to use wide screen panels or TVs mounted in vertical format.
Units can be supplied with a TV tuner card (NDDTV) that allows you to show live TV pictures in your message pages and our freeform editor allows the creation of pages that support TV. Operating at either 1280x1024, 1024x768 or 800x600 and supporting additional widescreen resolutions the information displays offer a high quality output for many different uses.
NDD1 - Wall Mounting Option
We also supply electronic noticeboard PCs with multiple output graphics cards that allow up to ten different screens to be connected to a single unit. Each noticeboard screen can operate in a different display group which means that each screen can display different information to the other screens. Click the Multiscreen Displays link on the left for further information.
Expansion of the system requires nothing more than adding additional NDD units to the LAN. Each NDD can be configured to operate in any one of the 255 noticeboard channels that the system supports.
Information storage is taken care of with an 80GB hard disk and all media, schedules and play lists are automatically uploaded to each NDD unit. This means the NDD unit when running is not generating any network traffic. Ports on the NDD units include a 10/100 Ethernet port, Audio Output, USB, RS232 and SVGA output.
NDD1 units have a very small footprint, measuring just 270mm(D) x 395mm(W) x 65mm(H). The unit is small enough to be placed near the display screen or on a small shelf, allowing simple cable runs of nothing more than power and network cables. In addition, they can be powered from a 12v source making them suitable for use in automotive applications. They weigh less than 5kgs
The NDD complies fully with the HTML specification and will show all the normal embedded file formats such as animated GIF, JPG, MPEG video clips, SWF flash, Java applets and activeX controls.
32" widescreen noticeboard Display connected to an NDD1
The output of the NDD unit is able to show a ticker type scrolling message controlled by the noticeboard controller along the bottom of the screen. An additional status bar can also be displayed that tells you the current date, the number of display pages in the slide show and the page number being displayed in the format Page 4/5 (4th page of 5).
The ticker message and status bar can be switched on or off with the controller, and if the status bar is switched off, the ticker message drops down to the bottom of the screen.
NDD1 Screen Capture showing ticker message and status bar.
RSS News Feed Decoder
The NDD1 now has an RSS news feed decoder. This allows the unit to connect to the Internet every hour and collect for example the latest news headlines from the BBC. The RSS feed is then displayed along the bottom of the noticeboard screen as a scrolling ticker message. The RSS decoder can be configured to run constantly or be controlled by the noticeboard controller. You can configure the RSS feed decoder to download any feed you require.
The NDD unit can operate in one of the two following ways:
Mode 1
In this mode the unit is sent pages from the Page Server package when the
user instructs it to.The pages are saved to hard disk inside the unit. The NDD then runs
from it's own internal page store. Using this mode you could take the unit to a trade show for example and it would cycle through its pages. You can also use the NDD in this mode for most information display applications.
Mode2
This is a secure mode as the NDD can be hidden on the network, ie you do
not have to share a directory on it's hard drive. The Page Server program uploads pages to a server
PC. Then every twenty seconds the NDD unit polls the server for any new or modified
pages, which if any are found, are copied onto it's own hard drive.
In both of these modes the units run from their own internal page store, thus reducing network traffic.
Page Monitor
In addition to the above modes, the NDD unit can monitor an html file that may be created by another application, typically something that polls a database on a regular basis and creates an html page. If the NDD detects that the page has altered it will redisplay the page.
Auto Group Swap
NDD units can be instructed to switch to a different display group up to 12 times a day. This would suit a building that changes function during the day and evening such as a normal day school becoming an adult education centre during the evening.
Remote Locations (Internet Connected)
NDD units can also be updated over the Internet by FTP. The controller package (Page Server) has a built in FTP module that will update NDD units on the Internet. NDD units will need a fixed IP number for this work.
This could be used to update NDD units in a chain of shops for example.
Very Low Power
The NDD unit draws around 30 watts of power from the mains supply, so it's energy requirement is very low.
Built in Schedule
The NDD will run from an internal schedule, so in addition to it showing it's normal selection of message pages it will also display certain pages at certain times of the day now and in the future. An NDD unit is in effect self running, so could be taken to trade shows etc as a single unit that will show your promotional material.
