A mockup of the room display on a TV, run by a Raspberry Pi.
A Raspberry Pi behind a TV turns a screen you already own into a room display for the price of the board. Raspberry Pi OS ships with Chromium, so there's nothing to install. Chromium opens your Meeting Room 365 display URL full screen and shows the room's bookings from Microsoft 365, Exchange or Google Workspace. Plugged into the wall, the Pi comes back to the display by itself after every power cut.
The short version lives on our Raspberry Pi hardware page, and the same steps are in the help centre as Raspberry Pi Install Instructions.
What you need
- A Raspberry Pi 3 or newer with at least 1 GB of RAM. A Pi 4 or 5 loads pages most smoothly. Every Pi Zero has 512 MB, which is too little for Chromium.
- A microSD card, 16 GB or larger
- A TV or monitor with HDMI
- The official Raspberry Pi power supply
- Wi-Fi or Ethernet
- A Meeting Room 365 account, and the room's calendar in Microsoft 365, Exchange or Google Workspace
- Optional: a case with a VESA mount, to hang the Pi on the back of the screen
1. Add the room in Meeting Room 365
Sign up for a free trial at admin.meetingroom365.com, connect your calendar and add the room. You'll need its display URL, which looks like https://app.meetingroom365.com/?key=YOURDISPLAYKEY.
A TV has no touchscreen, so turn off Enable Instant Reservations on the display. People keep booking from Outlook or Google Calendar, and the TV shows each booking as it lands.
2. Install Raspberry Pi OS
Flash Raspberry Pi OS (64-bit) to the microSD card with Raspberry Pi Imager. Enter your Wi-Fi and a user account in Imager's settings, so the Pi joins the network on first boot. Then put the card in the Pi, connect HDMI and power, and let it boot to the desktop.
3. Open the display on startup
Open a terminal and edit the desktop's autostart file:
nano ~/.config/labwc/autostart
Add this line, with your display URL:
chromium https://app.meetingroom365.com/?key=YOURDISPLAYKEY --kiosk --noerrdialogs --disable-infobars --no-first-run --enable-features=OverlayScrollbar &
--kiosk runs Chromium full screen with no address bar, and --enable-features=OverlayScrollbar hides the scrollbars. The & at the end lets the desktop finish loading. Save with Ctrl+O and exit with Ctrl+X.
4. Log in automatically and keep the screen on
Run sudo raspi-config, then:
- In System Options > Boot / Auto Login, choose Desktop Autologin.
- In Display Options > Screen Blanking, turn blanking off.
Choose Finish and reboot. From now on the Pi signs in, starts Chromium and opens the room display with no one touching it.
When something's off
The screen goes black after a few minutes. Check that Screen Blanking is off. If it is, look at the TV: its own sleep and eco timers can blank the screen while the Pi is wide awake.
The clock shows the wrong time. Run date. If the time zone is wrong, find yours with timedatectl list-timezones and set it with sudo timedatectl set-timezone America/New_York, using your zone in place of New York.
Chromium gets sluggish after days on. Reboot it every night. Run sudo crontab -e and add 0 3 * * * /sbin/reboot to restart at 3am, when no one is booking rooms.
