Digital Signage for Smart Buildings

Digital signage fed by the building's own systems. Where ordinary signage plays scheduled content, smart building signage renders live data pulled from the building management system, the IoT sensor network, the room-booking calendar and the parking system: room occupancy and availability, indoor air quality (CO₂, temperature, humidity), energy and water consumption against target, solar generation, lift status, free parking spaces by level, wayfinding, and building alerts or maintenance notices. The screens sit where the decisions happen — main lobby, lift lobbies, tenant floors, meeting-room doors, parking entrances, facility control room — which is what separates it from a dashboard nobody outside the facilities office ever opens.

Sensors report, the screen redraws the floor plan. Occupancy sensors — PIR, LiDAR, or camera-based counters — report room, desk and floor state to a workplace or IoT platform (Azure IoT, AWS IoT, FIWARE, or the vendor's own); SpinetiX widgets poll that platform over REST or subscribe over MQTT and repaint a colour-coded plan on lobby and lift-lobby screens every 5 to 30 seconds. Green means available, amber partly occupied, red full. Two design choices decide whether people trust it: the refresh has to be quick enough that someone walking to the third floor finds what the screen promised, and the sensor type has to match the question — a PIR sensor knows a room is in use, it does not know how many people are in it.

Yes, through the interfaces the BMS already exposes. SpinetiX reaches Siemens Desigo, Honeywell EBI and Johnson Controls Metasys through a BACnet/IP or Modbus gateway, an MQTT broker, or a REST endpoint, and renders HVAC status, energy consumption per floor, water usage and building health indicators on lobby, tenant-floor and control-room screens. Where the data arrives over HTTP — a REST endpoint, or a BI dashboard such as Power BI or Tableau built on top of building data — SpinetiX HUB is the secure connector: an administrator configures the credentials once and they stay inside HUB, so no operator or content editor ever holds access to the underlying system and there is nothing on the player to extract. Because BMS and IoT devices normally live on a separate OT network, the path across the IT/OT boundary belongs in the design, not in commissioning week.

It makes consumption visible where people can act on it. Buildings pursuing LEED, WELL or Estidama certification put real-time energy and water use, solar generation, waste diversion and carbon metrics on lobby and tenant-floor screens, and the same feed supports the tenant-engagement reporting those schemes ask for. Two conditions separate a working dashboard from wall decoration: every number needs a target beside it, because '412 kWh' means nothing without 'against a 480 kWh target'; and consumption has to be baselined before the screens go up. The behavioural saving is the claim in this category that gets asserted far more often than it gets measured — it is measurable, but only if the baseline exists first.

Bay sensors count, entrance screens publish the count. Ultrasonic or magnetic sensors at bay level report free or occupied to the parking management system; SpinetiX screens at the building entrance and on each parking level show free spaces by level and zone, and the same feed can drive an arrow or a floor map toward the nearest free block. Refresh has to be near real time, 5 to 30 seconds, because a driver acts on the number within a minute of reading it. The figure on the screen is only as good as the sensor layer under it: barrier-based entry and exit counting is cheaper but drifts through the day and needs periodic recalibration, while bay-level detection costs more and stays accurate.

They keep running on the last good data — and they should say so. Content and logic live on the SpinetiX player rather than on a server, so a lost connection to the BMS or the IoT broker does not blank the display: the widget keeps showing the most recently retrieved value, and a well-built layout stamps it with the time it was retrieved. Past a staleness threshold you set, the honest behaviour is to stop presenting the value as live — swap it for a 'sensor offline' state or hide the widget entirely, because yesterday's occupancy map shown as today's destroys trust in every other number on the screen. When the feed returns the widget resumes automatically, with no site visit and no republish.

No — signage displays building data, it does not run the building. A SpinetiX screen renders occupancy, air quality, energy and alerts, and building events can trigger what it shows; changing a setpoint, overriding a schedule or commanding HVAC belongs to the BMS and to the AV control layer (AMX, Crestron, Q-SYS, KNX), which own the interlocks and the audit trail for those actions. Two related boundaries are worth writing into the specification. Camera-based occupancy analytics is a third-party layer with its own privacy, consent and retention obligations — the player knows what it displayed, not who walked past it. And any two-way path between a public screen and the building's control system has to be reviewed by whoever owns the OT network before it is built, not after.