Some ageing swing boards needed to replaced. Rather than just buy some new boards the museum management decided they would like to use some form of digital display. I don’t know how much the swing boards would cost but the digital display system was put in place for under £250.

The display system included a 10.1” touch screen, a stand to securely house the tablet, some software to turn the tablet into a kiosk system, a quality power cable and some software to bring the content to the screen.

The tablet was a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1” device. This device was chosen for a couple of reasons; the screen was centred in the device (important when it gets slotted into the stand) and, having paid a trip to Curry’s to see the devices in the flesh, the Samsung just seemed to look better than the competition. The tablet cost £169.

Stands come in all sorts of shapes and mounting options. You can bolt them to the wall, a desk or the floor. Many are designed for specific models of a tablet and some are generic. The stands that support a specific device seemed to cost more so I went for a generic stand that was designed to support 10.1” tablets. The product description did state it supported the Samsung tablet but Samsung change the physical aspects of their devices almost every year so this didn’t really mean it would support the tablet I had purchased. I bought the stand a from eBay for £39.99. The tablet fitted but the window space in the stand was too large for the tablet’s screen. Some black plastic sheet, again purchased on eBay, solved that problem. A small hole was drilled in the side of the stand to provide access to the tablet’s power button. This wasn’t absolutely necessary but it was a bit of a pain getting the tablet out of the case just to power it up or down.

Positioning the stand, in the museum, was a bit tricky. The museum is small and there is a lot in it some spare space in range of a power socket wasn’t easy to come by.. Having eventually found a location I needed about 3 metres of power cable and purchased a decent cable, a JuicEBitz 20AWG, to ensure the charge rate was maintained.

To turn the tablet into a kiosk an app needed to be loaded. I looked at quite a few and in the end settled on Fully Kiosk Browser PLUS. I set-up Fully so that the tablet turned on and off to match the museum opening times, dimmed the screen if it hadn’t been used for a while and revert to the main screen after a couple of minutes. This worked reasonably well but the power scheduling wasn’t always reliable. Occasionally I would go into the museum outside of the opening hours and find the tablet powered on.

Now for some content. A number of letters were displayed on the swinging boards. These were scanned and loaded into the Omeka system. A small web page was developed which contained code driving the Flexslider component which turned the images loaded into Omeka into a slide show on the tablet.

As a first attempt it worked reasonably well and certainly encouraged the museum management to consider more digital projects.