Info Screen Application

We present you an Info Screen Application built for Basel Zoo (Switzerland) by André Bender (Swiss Web Factory ), known in our community as @swf.

Here’s the description he kindly provided:

Info Screen Application

For Basel Zoo we have implemented an info screen application with a real-time visitor counter.

The screen is in the entrance area of ​​the zoo and shows, in addition to the latest news, the number of admissions still available due to corona.

The application was developed in Wappler and receives news information from the web database and visitor numbers from the cash register system via JSON file.

We used Swiper for the animation and we update the data with the scheduler. The information texts about the visitors are displayed alternately in 3 different languages.

The content of the slides is controlled via our CMS. In addition to the background images, we can flexibly determine the text blocks, additional information and the display duration of each slide:

The number of visitors is also shown on the zoo’s homepage https://www.zoobasel.ch. These are controlled according to the display day (not every day has to be counted) and a minimum number of visitors. We can also control this data, together with the refresh rates, via our CMS.

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Hi @swf,
great work! Can you tell us a little bit about the technical solution? What kind of monitor does the zoo use and what application did they use to show the informaton?

Thanks @MH2ag,

I cant tell you the model but it’s a normal TV-monitor in a outdoor protection case.

The application to show the information is actually what we built with wappler, it’s a webpage that is shown on the screen. It’s a swiper fixed on the resolution size of the monitor. The webpage redirects to itself every 15 minutes so the lastest news updates made in the cms will be loaded to the screen. Like this we can also do code-updates without any help for the local IT reponsible (manual refresh of the browser).

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Do I understand that from the hosting environment of the Zoo’s website you are also running the CMS that accesses the slide show programming?

Is this application’s display dependent on running inside a Google Chrome powered browser whose page source comes from a computer running localhost php & mysql database for the CMS administration?

Or is this a browserless desktop app installed in a node environment referring to API s on the CMS host ?

Thank you!

(I have friends in beautiful Basel & see them every year.)

Do I understand that from the hosting environment of the Zoo’s website you are also running the CMS that accesses the slide show programming?

Yes. The website is in php/mysql and is hosted on the same server as the cms. Both has been made fully in Wappler.

Is this application’s display dependent on running inside a Google Chrome powered browser whose page source comes from a computer running localhost php & mysql database for the CMS administration?

There is a dynamic switch box that start/ends the hdmi output in the evening/morning which loads the screen application in Google Chrom fullscreen.

The application is actually a normal php page running a dynamic swiper at a predefined size (resolution of the screen) in an endless loop.

Like this we can easily manage the content and check it in live view.

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