The web dashboard has been updated today and includes some new features.
Steps towards offline support
Most noticeable is probably the device list. There are more colors. This is a change required for the offline feature released at a later date.
A device now has 4 possible states:
- Online (green): Just as before. The device was recently seen by the info-beamer backend and is considered online.
- Offline (red): The device is not connected to the service and has been offline too long. The device will no longer show your content.
- Disconnected (orange): The device has recently gone offline but thanks to the active offline settings will still be able to show your content if it’s powered one. Of course info-beamer has no way of knowing if a device is offline or powered off.
- Unknown (gray): Devices that have been offline for too long or devices with unknown state.
All except the Online state would be marked as Offline (red) previously. The new states now offer more insight on what’s going on. If you know that a device is powered on but is shown as Disconnected, you can check how the device will behave while it’s disconnected thanks to the new offline support status section on the device detail page:
Every device added to your account will use the “online” plan by default. A plan describes how the device will behave when offline. Check out the “Plan details” section to see how a plan works. The “online” plan allows 7 days of offline usage, but the device will start rebooting every 6 hours once it as been offline for one day. You can also see who billing behaves. An offline device using the “online” plan will stop being billed after 2 days. This is exactly how a device behaved previously, the new user interface just makes this more clear.
Of course you can also query this information using the API. The offline support status is returned in each Device Object.
In the future you will be able to reconfigure the offline plan for a device by clicking the Change button. This isn’t possible yet.
All except the “online” plan might have different pricing models. How the pricing will work in all cases and the details of all plans are still work in progress. The overall goal is to have a unified model that also includes info-beamer pi software licensing.
info-beamer pi licensing
Right now info-beamer pi licensing is done by contacting support. In the near future, this will change and everything will be mostly automated: You can purchase licenses directly in the shop and apply them to your Pis. The licensing mechanism will require a license file on each Pi. This will be implemented in a way you have maximum flexibility, so integrating into an existing software product will be as simple as possible. There will also be an API, so you can fully automated this process if you want.
New OS download flow
Previously you could download the info-beamer hosted operating system files directly on the device list page. This was a bit confusing as there was also a dedicated download page. So this has now changed and all OS download will use that download page going forward. The big plus is that the download page offers you to directly customize your download, so you don’t have to manually edit config files later.