Hey there
We’re a small artist collective from Basel currently using info-beamer for our art installations. This thread is about an installation in an electronic media art museum in our city. Continue reading this post if you’re interested in setting up something similar!
Task
Our commission included setting up 3 video walls; one of which was provided by the museum, consisting of 4 digital screens; the second consisting of 9 CRTs, powered by two Pi’s and two analog signal splitters; and the last that is subject to this post and consists of 6 small high-quality CRTs. If you’re wondering where we got all these CRTs… we lent most of them from friends!
Hardware (6x)
-Pi 3B+
-32GB MicroSD
-Adafruit A/V and RCA Cable (link)
Total cost per screen: 50€ if you go from scratch. Luckily we already had the Pi’s ourselves or lent them from friends, so we just had to buy the cables for 5€ each, which work perfectly and are highly recommended (we tried about 5-6 different brands and none worked).
First try
As always in the emerging art scene there is never enough time to prepare anything, nor money to hire someone to do it for you. Since all of us also work normal jobs or have our main duties, we just started with this video wall roughly a week before the vernissage. So we used an old guide to try and set up a PiWall installation. However, this turned out to be really cumbersome, as one of the involved software was outdated, and fixing it within one day was just not possible.
Second try
Finally, we stumbled upon info-beamer, and were stunned by the simplicity. Everything went smooth and we started assembling each device. Finally, we settled on the Magic Video Wall package to create a flexible 2x3 grid. Luckily, the museum had wifi so we could just connect them and sync them directly on the venue. You can see some impressions of the results below.
Conclusion
We are super happy with this solution and will definitely keep trying out new features and setups for future installations! 