Fancy a steaming portion of Kentucky Fried Bork? A fingerlickin' flub that's pure poultry in motion The best borks are the simplest, and today's is no exception. A black screen, a plaintive message, and a nugget of the Colonel's menu for the hungry masses has been lost. Despite KFC's protestations to the contrary, "Finger Lickin' Good" still adorns the wall of this emporium to fried chicken and worryingly flaccid fries. …
Yeah you might be right - still overkill.
I have set up a few pi's to do this and provided the environment does not let them overheat and the microSD cards are ok they are pretty much bombproof. It is one genuinely good use for them.
In theory, a Pi would be ideal for this kind of work. In fact, I believe NEC do a range of large screen displays with a slot in the back for a Pi Zero.
There are a couple of potential problems.
Manageability. Pis are fine if you have a few restaurants with maybe 2 or 3 Pis in each. According to Google, KFC has 900 restaurants in the UK alone. How big a staff would you require to support and update 2,700 Pis? How easy is it to manage Pis (or any Linux based machines) in some sort of Enterprise deployment and management system? We use System Center for Windows at work, and I could order any (or all) of the 300 machines I am responsible for to install a given bit of software, uninstall it, or even wipe themselves and re-install everything. I can be fairly certain that if I sent the order, it would be done in about 48 hours.. No humans needed onsite. I also know that if a machine should fail, I can send one of our part time staff out to the machine. They can press a few buttons. Not including the password and machine name (which is not always required anyway), it's about 5 keypresses or mouse clicks. 48 hours after this is done, the machine will have a new install of Windows 10, with all approved updates and any software needed installed (it only takes 48 hours because we have a lot of large applications and suites to deploy to each machine, remove the requirement for the software and it's about 1 hour).
Knowledge. At best, the installers sent out to install these devices will have a little knowledge of the device and it's software. As such, it's likely the devices are set up to be easily managed remotely, likely via some sort of MDM.
Now, I've asked this a few times, because up to a few weeks ago, we had a genuine need for a digital signage system and I wanted to use Pis for this. Every time I suggested the Pis I was asked a couple of questions. First, can it be integrated into System Center (preferable, as we already have an extensive System Center infrastructure). If not, what deployment and MDM systems are available for it? Now, everytime I have asked this, I've actually got no sensible answers and many downvotes. Sad really, because our project would have been an interesting one, and would have involved a lot of Pis. Not going to happen now because I couldn't come up with an MDM our IT department were happy to use.
Then there is reliability. Micro SD cards are, in my experience, not massively reliable. Hard drives and SSDs tend to be a lot more reliable, but I've not seen a way to boot a standard Raspberry Pi without using an SD card.
Not normally, so far as I've seen. If the USB has a higher boot priority than the HDD, it either boots from the USB device or it falls through to the next bootable device in the boot priority list in the BIOS config and may eventually end up at "No boot device found, please insert bootable media" or something like that.
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