info-beamer hosted 11 released

The info-beamer hosted operating system gets a new major release.

Updating to the latest release

You don't have to do anything manually. Within the next months starting in April, your devices will be gradually upgraded automatically. Please get in contact with support if you have any questions.

If you want to upgrade manually, you can click on the Activate stable channel option in the Manage menu on the device page of the device you want to upgrade. This will install the new version and reboot the device once.

A device is also updated if you use the web dashboard configuration editor and apply a new configuration to a device. As usual the updating process includes a failsafe and a device that doesn't reconnect back to the info-beamer service after a configuration change/OS upgrade will be rolled back to the previous working configuration automatically after a few minutes.

New Features

In addition to countless small improvements, the following bigger features have been added.

Pi4 support

The current 'testing' release supported the Pi4 for a while now. The support is now finally in stable. This means that the same OS download can now be used across all Raspberry Pi models.

Pi4 support includes 4K display output, Dual HDMI output ability as well as playback for HEVC encoded videos with a resolution of up to 3840x2180 (aka 4K).

Additionally OS upgrades now include the Pi4 EEPROM firmware files. This means that info-beamer OS not only updates the OS but also the included firmware within each Pi4 itself. This ensures that all devices running a given OS release use the same Pi4 firmware version.

Offline support (iteration 1)

info-beamer hosted will support various different offline plans in the near future. This will allow a device to work even if it doesn't have any internet connection at all given that the assigned package supports offline mode.

This OS release adds some of the requirements to make that work: When a device is switched over to a different offline plan, the device will make some preparations to being offline. This includes storing redundant copies of any assigned content file is they can be restored in case of a minor SD card issue.

Once the Offline feature is generally available it will be announced separately in another blog post.

LED status

The two LEDs (green/red) on the Pi are now controlled by the info-beamer OS and allows you to easily see the device status of a Pi. No more wondering if the Pi has network. Instead you can check the green LED for that.

The full list of status blinking combinations is listed on the installation page.

Data encryption

The main data partition of the Pi can now be optionally encrypted. This prevents the data from being usable without the Pi it has been assigned to. This feature will be announced separately in the future.

Questions/Feedback?

Head over to the community forums for questions or feedback regarding this release.