Shared data for roadside and checkout displays.

01

Start with the information already there.

I managed the roadside sign and could see useful information in the business systems around it. I wanted to try putting some of that information in front of customers, alongside the promotional content I was already producing.

I built a shared normalization layer so the display applications did not have to understand the quirks of every source system. On top of that, I built applications that turn the normalized data into short messages. The road sign was the first place I used them, but I never wanted the data layer tied to one screen.

02

Decide what the display should say.

The retail feed starts with point-of-sale records. The online-demand feed also reads through the POS database, using the ecommerce-related records held there. Telephone call records are grouped into department-level inquiry activity. A separate weather path supplies the conditions and forecasts used to produce gardening guidance.

Raw business records are not very useful on a sign. The applications apply selection rules, rank possible messages and turn the results into something that fits the available space. The retail labels are rule-based summaries of recorded activity, rather than predictions or independently verified best-seller claims.

The roadside sign uses all four applications: POS IQ, PBX IQ, Shopify IQ and Garden IQ. Xibo reads their feeds into datasets, and layout elements bind to the fields they need. The applications also handle unavailable or stale data, although polling a feed does not guarantee that its underlying records have just changed.

03

The till needed a different presentation.

I also explored whether Xibo could replace the native customer-display setup at the tills. In a development setup, I built a watchdog to work around the conflicts between Xibo and CounterPoint. It quickly became clear that forcing the same display software onto both surfaces created more problems than it solved.

The production tills stayed on CounterPoint’s native customer-display feature. I created the XML panel configuration and the HTML/JavaScript presentation inside it, then adapted that presentation to consume the same IQ feeds used elsewhere.

That panel consumes the POS IQ, PBX IQ and Shopify IQ feeds, turns them into customer-facing cards, and rotates promotional and branding imagery.

It shares the screen with transaction line items, customer information and totals. The advertising area remains visible during the sale, so the content has to work beside the transaction rather than taking over the display. The touchscreen is effectively display-only in this implementation.

04

Keep the common part underneath.

Both presentation paths are in use. The roadside EMC uses Xibo datasets and layouts; the tills use CounterPoint's native panel with my renderer. The feeds are shared, while the layout and presentation suit each surface.

Keeping CounterPoint at the tills did not mean throwing away the integration work. The reusable part was the feed, not the display software.