You can buy a Screenly Player ready to run, or assemble one yourself from a Raspberry Pi. Self-building works well, and it asks for some comfort with hardware and some care over the parts.
Most of the reliability of a self-built player comes down to three choices: the board, the case, and the power supply. The rest is assembly.
What you need
A Raspberry Pi
A Raspberry Pi 5 or 4 B with 2 GB of memory or more. More memory is better.
See Supported boards for which generations we recommend.
A case with ventilation
A Raspberry Pi runs hot, and a screen runs for years without anyone opening the case. Heat is what shortens that life.
Pick a case with real ventilation, fitted heatsinks, or an aluminium body that acts as one heatsink. We do not recommend the official case from the Raspberry Pi Foundation, because it has no ventilation holes.
Running without a case at all is possible and not a good idea. The board is fragile and gets hot.
The official power supply
Use the official Raspberry Pi power supply for your model. Many third-party supplies deliver power inconsistently, which shows up later as a screen that reboots or freezes at random and looks like a software fault.
The Pi 5 and Pi 4 B use USB-C. Older boards use micro USB.
A microSD card
Class 10 or better, 16 GB or larger. See SD cards for the card we ship in our own players.
A card reader and an HDMI cable
You need a way to write the card from your computer, and a cable to reach the display. Many computers have a card slot built in, and a USB reader works otherwise.
You do not need a display to build the player, but you need one to pair it.
Put it together
- Write ScreenlyOS to the microSD card. Write the image has the steps.
- Insert the card into the slot on the underside of the board.
- Fit the board into its case.
- Connect the player to the display over HDMI.
- Connect the power supply last, so the display is already attached when the player boots.
The player boots and shows a pairing code. Boot and pair the device covers what happens next.
Powering over ethernet
The Pi 4 B and 3 B+ can be powered over ethernet with the appropriate hardware, which gets a player down to a single cable. That is worth considering for a screen where the power outlet is awkward and a network drop is not.
A Raspberry Pi you assembled is not a Screenly Player. That name means the hardware we sell, which matters when you are reading hardware-specific pages.