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The public board

A public surface can live on a screen and run itself. This page is the "make it look right on a wall" setup; for turning sharing on and off, see Public sharing.

What you can put up​

  • A view: one saved view as a big, read-only gallery or list. A build board, a shop's current work, what's done this week.
  • A collection: an entity kind plus a filter, shared without saving a view first.
  • A board: several views side by side, laid out for one wide screen.

All of them read from a separate public endpoint that only returns what you opted in to share, so a screen in a public room never exposes the rest of the workspace.

Setting it up for a screen​

Each surface carries display options:

  • Theme. Force dark or light so the screen looks the same regardless of the device's OS setting. A lobby TV usually wants one fixed look.
  • Layout. Tiles for a photo-forward grid, or list for a dense column.
  • Auto-refresh. How often the page re-fetches, picked from a short list: off, every 30 seconds, every minute (the default), 5 minutes, 15 minutes, or hourly. A wall display picks up new items on its own without anyone reloading. Choose Off, static (e-paper) to stop the timer entirely.
  • Banner and footer. An optional cover image across the top and a line of text along the bottom, for a title or a "powered by".

E-paper panels​

Reflective e-paper screens need black-on-white and shouldn't redraw on a timer (the refresh ghosts). Turn on e-paper mode and Cobblr forces a light, high-contrast palette; pair it with a refresh of 0 so the panel holds a still image. The editor has an E-paper preset that sets both.

Running it​

Open the surface URL on the display device once and leave it. It re-fetches on its own cadence, so the board stays current hands-off. When you're done, revoke the surface and the URL stops resolving right away.

For a step-by-step version of this, see the cookbook recipe Put a status board on a screen.