About

info-beamer pi is the raw player software that powers the info-beamer hosted service. It's the standalone software intended to run on Raspbian on the Raspberry Pi.

You can download a "private version" of info-beamer pi for free. The "private version" offers the same features the commercial version does except for a small banner that is displayed every minute.

Before using info-beamer pi be sure to understand whether you need to buy a license or not. Check the info-beamer pi page to find out more. The basic idea is: info-beamer pi is free for private use. If you would like to make use of this software in a commercial way, you must buy a license which will support the continued development.

Licensing options

If you use info-beamer hosted, you don't need an extra license for info-beamer pi. Its use within the info-beamer hosted service is free. You just pay for the info-beamer hosted costs based on usage.

Private

You can use this license to develop visualizations for yourself in a purely private / home environment. You cannot put up those visualizations in a public space or charge money. This info-beamer version will show up a small info-beamer logo every minute.

This license is intended to learn about info-beamer and get familar with it. Just download info-beamer and get started. You have all the time in the world to test the software. But only if it is in completely non-commercial way and the resulting visualization isn't put up in a public space. Otherwise you have to purchase a commercial license (see below).

Commercial

You can use this license to use the software in any way you like on a single device. You can sell the software as part of a hardware/software bundle you offer. Please note that the license still only covers a single device. For multiple devices you have to purchase the appropriate number of licenses for each of them. See the EULA for scary lawyer talk.

Please get in contact if you have any question about it.

The commercial version won't display a small logo every minute. So the screen content is completely under your control.

Premium

You can purchase a premium license which provides the same software as the commercial version but offers support to setup your first device and an introduction for learn more about info-beamer to get to most out of it.

Please get in contact for pricing information.

Reporting problems

If you have any problem, it helps to provide as much information as possible. If have a problem with info-beamer pi, please include the console output of info-beamer pi by running it with the INFOBEAMER_LOG_LEVEL=3 environment variable set. These logs help to understand your runtime environment and see the cause of the problem. If possible, create a zip file of the complete node directory and upload the zip file to a secure file sharing service (for example Dropbox) and send a link where we can download it. That way we can try to reproduce the problem locally.

If you want to report a problem with the info-beamer website, please also include as much detail as possible, so we can reproduce the problem. Security related reports are more than welcome, but we can't offer a bug bounty for those at the moment.

Purchasing info-beamer pi

Purchasing a single info-beamer pi license will grant you permission to use info-beamer pi on a single device. You can purchase licenses in the info-beamer shop.

How to purchase

Head over to the shop (you might have to register if you're not signed up yet). Select the type of license you want to buy. And fill out the payment form. That's it. You'll get a confirmation by email and you'll have access to the info-beamer pi download page where you can then download the unbranded version if you bought a commercial license. You can download the software anytime as often as you want. Using the software on a Pi requires proper license activation for that Pi.

What you get

If you bought a license you have access to the info-beamer pi software download. The download consists of a single tar.gz file. The file includes the single binary info-beamer, example code and some text files. Make sure to read those. They contain important information to get you started.

Licensing

Running the commerical version of info-beamer pi requires a license file present on the device. If you run the software without a license present, you'll get an error message when running info-beamer. The error output includes an url to the info-beamer website that allows you to assign a license.

Assigning a license to a Pi will create a license blob. You'll have to place this on a device for info-beamer to start. You have multiple options of integrating the license blob into your environment: you can place the license blob into the environment variable INFOBEAMER_LICENSE or place it into various files info-beamer will automatically look for:

• Environment variable INFOBEAMER_LICENSE.
• File license.txt within the root node directory.
• File .license.txt within the root node directory.
• File license-<serial>.txt within the root node directory.
• File /boot/info-beamer.txt.
• File /licenses/info-beamer.txt.
• File .info-beamer.txt in $HOME directory.
• On the Pi4: Within the boot config stored in EEPROM.

Files can have multiple lines, each one with a license. This can be useful if you have a mechanism to distribute a file to multiple Pis already as you can share a common licensing file containing multiple license blobs across devices.

On the Pi4 you can even burn the license into the EEPROM content on the Pi itself, so the license is available regardless of which SD card you use in that Pi. Get in contact for details.

License blob

The "license blob" is a text string that contains information about an assigned license. It must be placed on the device so info-beamer pi can pick it up and verify that it's properly licensed.

A license blob currently looks like this:

v1:56cb36<...long string..>88ad47806c2f # serial 123456789

The part after and including the # is optional and can optionally be removed. It's there to make it easier to check which serial is included in the license. Everything before the # must be used verbatim. Do not add newlines or modify the content in any way as info-beamer pi will not be able to detect the license in that case.

Warranty

The software comes without warranty of any kind. Please make sure the software works for you and solves your problem before purchasing a license. Use the private version to test the software for as long as you need before you purchase the commercial version. Both version behave identical (except for the small logo in the private version), so you can be sure everything will work once you make the switch. The private version can be downloaded for free.

Safety of your investment

Should info-beamer.com ever stop selling info-beamer pi and shut down by choice (which we don't intend to!), we'll release the source code under the MIT license.

Support

Should you have problems with the software or need help, feel free to get in contact or head over to the community. We'll try to answer your questions. If you need continuous support or help with developing visualizations feel free to get in contact. We're sure we'll find a fair way to do this.