Price Tags

Introduction

Assume you have a small convenient store and going to put electronic price tags beside your products. You will refresh the contents of the price tags from time to time.

Now you already have a ‘Store Management System’, which maintains all the product information including ‘SKU’, ‘Title’, ‘Price’, ‘Manufacturer’, ‘Image’, and more. This system also provides API so we can fetch the price data and send updates to the SyncSign.

You also build a simple ‘price server’, to interface between the Store Management System, and the SyncSign Hub.

You can create a Plug-in and run it on Hub. The setup workflow is as below:

• Let all the display tags join the Hub using SyncSign’s Admin Portal

• The Hub uploads all associated Display node’s ID on to the ‘Price Server’

• Use a bar-code scanner to bind each display tag’s node ID with an SKU (Stock Keeping Unit)

• The ‘Price Server’ remember the association of SKU - Tag

• The Hub uses HTTPS request to fetch one or more SKUs detail information

• The Hub parse the details and create a layout template then send to the tag screen

Then, how to update the tag whenever an SKU’s price changed? The Hub itself doesn’t know the price has been changed, because it happens on ‘Price Server’. A simple polling mechanism is as below:

• The Hub queries the ‘Price Server’ every N minutes, and it’s an HTTPS GET request

• If there are prices changed, the ‘Price Server’ returns a Modified-List

• Now the Hub knows what tags should be refreshed, then it requests the ‘Price Server’ for details and sends to the display tag one by one

• Eventually, the Hub reports the update result to the ‘Price Server’, indicates whether any failure occurred. Some nodes may dead or off-line and need maintenance.

Source Code and Setup

TBD. Coming soon.