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Daveed1973's avatar
Daveed1973
Advocate II
7 years ago

Does anyone run Power BI dashboards on Raspberry Pi running Windows IOT Core?

I'm curious how people are displaying their Power BI dashboards where they are needed to run without any user involvement. For example on a screen in a warehouse which is showing how many products ar...
General Comment
Anonymous's avatar
Anonymous
Not applicable
7 years ago

I am in the process of doing this exact setup. I have been told it is possible and just started to look into it today. I can keep you posted with what i find.

Daveed1973's avatar
Daveed1973
Advocate II
7 years ago

I have been using dashboards in this way for a few years now and they have been working fine up until recently. I all of a sudden started having issues refreshing the dashboards when they had tiles on them. The screen would go blank and then after a while it would revert to the Power BI home page instead of the dashboard URL.

 

I raised a ticket with Microsoft for this but go no help, they didn't even know what Windows IOT Core was!

 

I have now started replacing these with the standard Raspberry Pi OS and must admit I find the refreshes run a LOT quicker.

 

Would be interested to see what your findiong are though and please shout up if you would like any hints and tips on this.

  • Anonymous's avatar
    Anonymous
    Not applicable
    7 years ago

    I am currently trying to setup a Raspberry Pi 3B+ running on the NOOBS/Raspbian OS to do the same. But I cannot seem to load the screens at all, its just blank. I use the Chromium browser to logon to the Power BI Report Server URL and I get nothing. I also tried to logon to the URL where the PBI screens are embedded and get nothing as welll. How are you setup currently and how do you make it work? I plan to deploy a few of these dashboards across the office. Thanks in advance!

    • Daveed1973's avatar
      Daveed1973
      Advocate II
      7 years ago

      Hi, these are the steps I follow to get my dashboards working on Raspbian OS. Have done around 15 of these so far with this method with very few issues. Hope this helps...

       

      1. Download the image for “Raspbian Stretch with desktop and recommended software” from this URL https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian/
      2. Extract and then install the image onto a blank SD card (minimum 8GB). Win32DiskImager is a good tool for installing images.
      3. Once the OS has installed, ensure all updates are installed.
      4. Open the web browser and in the settings set the start page to the URL of the dashboard you wish to display adding ?chromeless=1 to the end of the URL.
      5. Install the Super Auto Refresh Plus extension and set it to refresh every 15 mins for the Power BI page that you have just entered as the start page.
      6. Open Terminal and enter sudo nano /etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE-pi/autostart
      7. Comment out the @xscreensaver -no-splash line by adding a # at the start.
      8. Enter the following code to the bottom of the file
        #Disable the screensaver
        @xset s off
        @xset -dpms
        @xset s noblank
        @unclutter
        # Ensures if the Pi does not shut down correctly it suppresses error messages and just loads the correct screen again.
        @/usr/bin/chromium-browser --kiosk –app=url of dashboard
      9. Save the file
      10. Then type sudo raspi-config
      11. Select “Interface options”
      12. Select VNC to enable VNC so you can remotely connect
      13. Finally, set the name of the device, Whilst in Terminal type sudo nano /etc/hostname and change the name.
      14. Save and reboot