Tonight I setup the new Raspberry Pi 4b that I picked up last week, namely because it has two outputs and I saw an opportunity to further consolidate some of the crap taking up space on my desk, and overall I was really impressed with how easy this one was to use!
Like, it seriously took me longer to pull the new HDMI cables underneath my desk than it did to get the OS installed, mostly thanks to actually buying a kit with a pre-loaded SD card this time, but even configuring the dual monitors ended up being super easy because apparently it’s a function built into the OS these days. One of the two monitors that I wanted to connect this to is vertical, and yet it only took a second to rearrange the displays and then correct the orientation for the second monitor.
A couple of URLs later, I was driving two DAKboards from one Raspberry Pi… 🙂
I think the only other thing they could do to make it even easier would be to let you choose which software you do and don’t want during the install because it takes a while to remove all of the games and programming tools and LibreOffice afterwards. One of these days I need to just make a list of them and write my own script to streamline it for the future, seeing as mostly I just need a browser installed (Chromium) to pull up my DAKboards, which as you can see above is the reason for this particular box.
…in fact, if they ever happen to make a version with three HDMI ports, well, let’s just say that I’ve already got the use case sitting in front of me because in total my desk is currently surrounded by three DAKboard displays … a to-do list that pulls in my daily tasks from Todoist with a few other things, my newest board showing my goals and habits I’m trying to work towards this year, and lastly my digital calendar which was actually the first one that I put together over two years ago at this point!
Ultimately I do think that eventually I want to check out DAKboard’s retail version of a display + CPU because I can see when we build our next house much more heavily incorporating digital displays throughout the rooms between smart home controls and calendar/temp/clock displays and even simply more interactive digital photo frames. It’s super hard for me to pick what photos are worthy of framing to go on the wall because we’re constantly getting new ones to share, but having a gallery of connected displays throughout the house to all rotate through family photos seems like it would be a neat application.
And not having to buy a separate Raspberry Pi to drive every last one of them would be a nice perk… 😉