FX420 Menu Creators

Built for a single-location dispensary running 10 screens. When I started, menus were Excel files manually converted to images, loaded onto flash drives, and physically swapped on each screen — which meant menus going dark while you updated them, in front of customers.

How It Evolved

First I built a local website to display menus so updates could be pushed remotely. That hit a wall with smart TV caching — updates wouldn’t reflect cleanly in real time. I switched to Raspberry Pi Zeros running Screenly OSE, a $15-per-screen solution I physically set up and configured for each of the 10 displays. That gave me proper remote content management.

The menu creation tools automated the formatting work — colors, borders, images, layout — so staff with minimal Excel knowledge could generate consistent branded menus. Two separate tools handled different content types: one for general menus, one specifically for strain menus with flower names, costs, and THC/CBD percentages.

How It Works

The tools read Excel files and extract the relevant cell ranges, convert them to bitmaps using clipboard capture (CopyPicture()), then resize to 4K (3840x2160) or 1080p depending on the screen. For daily specials, ImageMagick composites additional images on top of the menu template at specified X/Y offsets. Finished images are uploaded to each Pi via SFTP into /home/pi/screenly_assets/, then registered or updated through Screenly’s REST API at /api/v1.1/assets. Asset names follow an AUTOMATED_[timestamp] convention so the tools can find and replace them on subsequent updates.

Slack Integration

The Slack integration uses incoming webhooks. The bot monitors a channel and parses plain-language commands — something like change price item $50 — feeds that into the menu creator, and pushes the result to the screens. No interface to learn, no files to manage.

Current Status

They licensed the software. It’s still running without me — I don’t maintain it anymore.

Source:
Menu Creator
Strain Menu Creator