Has anyone here used BrightSign hardware as Perspective clients? Any thoughts on the experience?
I like the idea, and I have thought about this many times, but never actually pulled the trigger.
I have used a Chrome Bit before, and that’s essentially a chrome cast. With it we used a signage app that automatically forces it to load into a webpage based off a config file.
My biggest question about the Sign hardware is the graphics performance, loading P&IDs in Perspective is often best done by a device with a GPU to calculate all of the SVGs quickly and keep the page from thrashing during load. I typically recommend iPads for this reason.
I’d be curious to find out how sign hardware does.
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I have an eBay XD1033 coming, I’ll update with how it performs after ICC.
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How did it go when you got back home? Also, great meeting you at ICC!
Great meeting you too!
Unfortunately I haven't had a good chance to test it yet, and won't until mid next week.
The have-to-do's always seem to crush the want-to-do's. 
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Okay, here we go.
BrightSign XD1033 (Firmware 8.4.14)
Benchmarks
- 513/555 points
- 1024x1024 canvas
- 1 fish: 37 fps
- 500 fish: 30 fps
- 1,000 fish: 16 fps
- 5,000 fish: 6 fps
- Run/Minute: 11.38 +- 0.051
- Total Score: 154
- Canvas Score
- Test 1: 51
- Test 2: 48
- WebGL Score
- Test 1: 29
- Test 2: 26
Perspective Content
@kgamble provided an example P&ID screen to test loading times with. To be frank, the loading time on the XD1033 is hot garbage. From when the Perspective loading screen appears to when the entire page is loaded takes about 30s. For reference, my Ryzen 7 5850U laptop takes 3s.
With a simple dashboard, things are better. Quick refresh times, quick updates on project saves, etc. However, as soon as you put any charts on the page it starts getting real slow again (10+ second loads).
For content that rarely/never refreshes, you could get away with using this player. Any one looking for dynamic or component-dense designs will be disappointed.
User Experience
The BrightSign Author application used to push content to the players isn't terrible. The UI is a little weird, but after you use it a couple times it's easy to get the hang of.
Pushing content to the player is very simple over the network; the unit resets very quickly (~3s) so it's easy to iterate.
The "zones" features makes it possible to position content however you'd like it on the screen. You can position zones where ever you'd like, and the choose the content that gets displayed in each zone.
HTML is only one of the supported content types,
Mouse and keyboard support works well. The default cursor is a gross giant "X", I'm not sure if it's possible to change it. Unfortunately I don't have a touchscreen available to test touch input support, but they claim it's supported.
The "snapshot" feature lets you remotely view a snapshot of the player's output in full resolution.
The ability to schedule what content is displayed at which time of day/week is powerful.
Conclusion
The XD1033 is not suitable for Perspective content. However, the BrightSign management experience is great. If the performance was better, this would be a platform I would be happy to manage for Perspective based dashboards.
I'm going to see if I can get some more information from sales about the latest XD5 series of players. The XD1033 I tested against was from 2016, so this is not a current offering nor the top of the line.
The XD1033 is advertised as having Advanced HTML Performance, while the newer equivalent XD1035 is advertised as having Enterprise+ HTML Performance, with "Smooth animations & tickers with 60fps frame rates" and "Highly responsive & Fluid content interactions". Presumably performance would be better.
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Very informative! Always good to learn about niche tools that might streamline deployments.
You can always send the company the test URL I gave you to see if they say load times are faster on the higher end device. However at that point you might be competing with ARM based devices for cost affective players.
True. There's definitely value in the ease of use, though. If you know the workflow, going from plugging the unit into the network to displaying content would take ~30 seconds.
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Recap from last years episode:
So my XD1035 finally arrived, and performance with Perspective is "better".... but still bad.
The unit is indeed more powerful, but not in any of the ways that helps rending content in Perspective.
Summary: Continue avoiding Brightsign players as Perspective clients.
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