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Visionect’s electronic paper platform helps your digital sign bear fruit

Visionect, 9 Mar 2015

Just like the roots are essential for a cherry tree to produce cherries, so is the system behind a digital sign necessary for the sign to ‘bear fruit’ and display content. In our e-paper signs this system is the Visionect Platform.

When a cherry tree bears fruit, you know that the cherries soon to make their way into a yummy pie couldn’t come to be without the roots of the tree deep underground providing strength and stability to the tree, drawing from the earth all that the tree needs to produce its ‘content’ – the cherry.

In much the same way a digital sign will need behind it some sort of structure to allow the sign to work and display your message. This is the very essence of the screen, tablet or signage application – a functional system that controls the hardware of the display and connects it with the content management you have in place.

In Visionect’s electronic paper signs this system is the Visionect Platform, running the signage applications and streaming graphical data to their screens – and here’s what it looks like.

The roots of your tree

The Visionect Platform, the underground roots of your digital signage tree, consists of a server capable of running applications and streaming graphical data and electronic paper signs capable of receiving and displaying this data.

The platform is tried and tested in practice: it powers projects ranging from highly interactive tabletop ordering systems in the most demanding of environments, to large tiled outdoor traffic signs running in the hot Australian climate.

An interactive digital menu running on the Visionect Platform.

The heart feeding the system

At the heart of the Visionect Platform is the Visionect Server, our core platform product we constantly improve and upgrade with new features.

At the heart of the Visionect Platform is the Visionect Server, our core platform product we constantly improve and upgrade with new features.

Just like the underground roots will provide nutrients to the cherry tree or the heart will pump blood to your body, the server will make sure that e-paper displays of the thin client digital signs will show the correct content, taking care of all the operational aspects of running the signage, from the control to monitoring of devices.

How it works is not complicated: a digital sign will connect to the Visionect Server software which will then run the apps in a session created for each individual sign, with the sign and server exchanging graphical data and interactions. A Visionect Server software license is included with every one of our electronic paper signs and can be deployed on Windows, Linux, OSX and Cloud servers.

The branches for your cherries

A Visionect device is an electronic paper display paired with our intelligent hardware and software that will display content at the client’s location. In short: it’s the medium for the message of your signage ‘tree’- a fully functional digital sign.

The electronic paper signs connect to the Visionect Server via Wi-Fi or cellular networks, and can either be:

In addition, the power options of the signage devices enable the creation of products with very long battery life or even completely autonomous and self-sustainable outdoor systems that can be indefinitely powered by a solar cell.

Our development kit to get you started with e-paper and the Visionect Platform.

Pruning the tree

Around the Visionect Platform’s functionality we’ve built a host of features that enable developers to deploy, control, manage and integrate the platform in their solutions, using standard web technologies to design interactive apps.

Around the Visionect Platform’s functionality we’ve built a host of features that enable developers to deploy, control, manage and integrate the platform in their solutions.

Applications can be developed with frontend built with HTML, Javascript and CSS and backend based on any backend technology such as Node.JS, .Net, Java, Python, Ruby and others; the Visionect Server will take any web application, process it and push it to the e-paper signs.

Besides easy development with the existing skills and tools, you’ll also get to reuse any existing web apps for really fast development. This means that all the applications that you’ve already built using web technologies require minimal work to run on e-paper displays powered by the Visionect Platform.

Not bad when it comes to cherry-picking the best option of deploying your custom digital sign wouldn’t you say?