HCHTech
Well-Known Member
- Reaction score
- 3,840
- Location
- Pittsburgh, PA - USA
I could have sworn I posted about this already, but I can't seem to find it - so excuse the duplication or blame early-onset dementia, your choice. 
Some well-meaning individual donated a 55" TV for my church to use as an announcement board in the common hall. Somewhere, they had seen one in action and thought it would be a good addition and useful. So guess who got the job of figuring out how to implement it.
Budget was very small (as usual), but I figured I could do it with a Chromebit and Chrome Sign Builder for a small investment in hardware and no ongoing fees. I wasn't wrong, but I severely underestimated the amount of time it would take to figure it out and get it going (also, as usual!).
It turns out that all of the guides that are out there assume you are a paying customer of GSuite and the non-profit infrastructure is different, so those guides don't help a lot.
We were using the umbrella Google non-profit account from our parent organization in Boston, so step one was getting authorized to do that. 5 or 6 phone calls, emailing them our 501(c)(3) paperwork even though they have to have that information already in 4 or 5 places, getting credentials, etc.
Then, once that was done, actually creating the NP GSuite account - 3 separate tech support chats over a 2 week period while we waited for the credentials to clear and all of the ducks to fall into place on their end.
Then, getting the sign-builder setup to recognize our Chromebit - I must have reset that thing to factory defaults and started over 6 or 8 times along with more tech support chats with Google when it finally came to light that despite being a non-profit and getting everything else for no cost, we had to purchase a device license for the Chromebit. $25, so at this point who cares....just one problem, Google doesn't sell them. You have to purchase them from a reseller. They send me a link to a page with about 300 resellers listed. Awesome.
I throw a dart at that page and send an email request to one of the resellers. Then wait. No response, no ticket number, no nothing. After 4 or 5 days, I pick someone else and call them this time - Oh, that request has to go in by email. Sigh. I send an email, but just in case, I pick a third vendor and send an email there as well. Another 4 or 5 days go by and then I start getting responses from all 3 firms. The 2 I didn't buy from are still sending me emails today, 2 months after all of this went down.
So, by the time I get the device license (you don't apply it or anything, you give them your account when you purchase it and it just "appears" in GSuite after some period of time, in my case 48 hours) I have long forgotten the details of how it works in practice, so I review all of that again, and get it mostly working at my place.
Unfortunately I make the mistake of setting it in kiosk mode at my shop. When I take it onsite, it won't find the internet, because it doesn't know about their wireless yet (duh). I can't seem to get the damned thing to give me the option of choosing a different wifi connection, more reading, more reboots, etc., so I reset it all again and start over onsite.
Well - it's finally working. We have a google slide deck, that someone other than me is maintaining, and it just pushes to the display. It turns itself on and off on our schedule, and everyone is mostly happy.
We have 3 google accounts necessary to make this work - one for the slide deck, one for the GSuite admin, and one more for reasons I have forgotten - I think that one is for the master signbuilder account to set the scheduling.
Oh, here's a happy thing I found out - you can't pull a google calendar into a google slide with a link. People have been asking for this since 2010 in their forums, so I don't think it's going to happen. We have to screenshot the calendar every week and paste it onto a slide to get that information on the display.
I have two pages of single-spaced instructions so some other person can theoretically figure it out in my absence (or more accurately, *I* can re-figure it out in 6 months when something breaks.
But I love pro-bono work - really. It's great. You should do some.
Some well-meaning individual donated a 55" TV for my church to use as an announcement board in the common hall. Somewhere, they had seen one in action and thought it would be a good addition and useful. So guess who got the job of figuring out how to implement it.
Budget was very small (as usual), but I figured I could do it with a Chromebit and Chrome Sign Builder for a small investment in hardware and no ongoing fees. I wasn't wrong, but I severely underestimated the amount of time it would take to figure it out and get it going (also, as usual!).
It turns out that all of the guides that are out there assume you are a paying customer of GSuite and the non-profit infrastructure is different, so those guides don't help a lot.
We were using the umbrella Google non-profit account from our parent organization in Boston, so step one was getting authorized to do that. 5 or 6 phone calls, emailing them our 501(c)(3) paperwork even though they have to have that information already in 4 or 5 places, getting credentials, etc.
Then, once that was done, actually creating the NP GSuite account - 3 separate tech support chats over a 2 week period while we waited for the credentials to clear and all of the ducks to fall into place on their end.
Then, getting the sign-builder setup to recognize our Chromebit - I must have reset that thing to factory defaults and started over 6 or 8 times along with more tech support chats with Google when it finally came to light that despite being a non-profit and getting everything else for no cost, we had to purchase a device license for the Chromebit. $25, so at this point who cares....just one problem, Google doesn't sell them. You have to purchase them from a reseller. They send me a link to a page with about 300 resellers listed. Awesome.
I throw a dart at that page and send an email request to one of the resellers. Then wait. No response, no ticket number, no nothing. After 4 or 5 days, I pick someone else and call them this time - Oh, that request has to go in by email. Sigh. I send an email, but just in case, I pick a third vendor and send an email there as well. Another 4 or 5 days go by and then I start getting responses from all 3 firms. The 2 I didn't buy from are still sending me emails today, 2 months after all of this went down.
So, by the time I get the device license (you don't apply it or anything, you give them your account when you purchase it and it just "appears" in GSuite after some period of time, in my case 48 hours) I have long forgotten the details of how it works in practice, so I review all of that again, and get it mostly working at my place.
Unfortunately I make the mistake of setting it in kiosk mode at my shop. When I take it onsite, it won't find the internet, because it doesn't know about their wireless yet (duh). I can't seem to get the damned thing to give me the option of choosing a different wifi connection, more reading, more reboots, etc., so I reset it all again and start over onsite.
Well - it's finally working. We have a google slide deck, that someone other than me is maintaining, and it just pushes to the display. It turns itself on and off on our schedule, and everyone is mostly happy.
We have 3 google accounts necessary to make this work - one for the slide deck, one for the GSuite admin, and one more for reasons I have forgotten - I think that one is for the master signbuilder account to set the scheduling.
Oh, here's a happy thing I found out - you can't pull a google calendar into a google slide with a link. People have been asking for this since 2010 in their forums, so I don't think it's going to happen. We have to screenshot the calendar every week and paste it onto a slide to get that information on the display.
I have two pages of single-spaced instructions so some other person can theoretically figure it out in my absence (or more accurately, *I* can re-figure it out in 6 months when something breaks.
But I love pro-bono work - really. It's great. You should do some.
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