Running screens day to day

The four settings groups

General — device name, language, and what the app does on boot. Name the device for where it is; front-window is findable, Android-8842 is not.

Display — orientation, brightness, screen timeout. Pin all three. Leaving Android's own display timeout in charge is the most common cause of "the screen keeps going dark".

Content — media source, cache ceiling, refresh intervals. Set the cache to fit the device's storage with room to spare.

System — reboot schedule, logging, diagnostics. A nightly reboot at four in the morning is cheap insurance on cheap hardware.

A weekly glance

• Is the board showing what you expect?
• Is anything on it stale? A feed-driven widget holding an old value is working correctly and still needs fixing upstream.
• Is the device warm to the touch and in an enclosure with airflow?

A quarterly visit

• Check free storage and the cache size.
• Reboot it and confirm the board comes back on its own.
• Confirm the admin PIN is still known by two people.
• Replace anything seasonal that has quietly gone out of date.

Changing a board that is on the wall

Edit the draft, publish when you are ready, and look at it in the room. If it does not hold up, revert. Twenty published versions are retained.

Diagnostics

Settings → System has the log. The three things it answers most often:

• Whether a feed is failing (and therefore why a widget is stale).
• Whether media is being evicted from a full cache.
• Whether the app is restarting, which usually means memory pressure from a video that is too large for the hardware.

When something is wrong

Work down the layers: is the device on, is it on the network, is the console reachable, is the layout published, is the feed alive. Nearly every incident is one of those five, and the log will tell you which within a minute.