TV Setup

The three displays

One stick per TV, one URL per stick. Scan the code to check the screen from a phone.

Stick setup, start to finish

1. 01

   Stop Windows interrupting the screen

   Settings → System → Power & sleep: set both Screen and Sleep to Never.

   Screen saver: None. Sign-in options → Require sign-in: Never.

   Set Windows Update active hours to your open hours so it never restarts mid-shift.

2. 02

   Auto-login at boot

   Press Win + R, run netplwiz, uncheck “Users must enter a user name and password”, enter the password twice. Reboot to confirm it lands on the desktop with no prompt.

3. 03

   Install Chrome

   Open it once, dismiss the first-run prompts, close it. If the board feels sluggish on this stick, Edge is often lighter on older Atom chips and takes the same flags.

4. 04

   Create the kiosk shortcut

   Right-click the desktop → New → Shortcut, and paste this, swapping in that TV’s URL from above:

   "C:\Program Files\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --kiosk --noerrdialogs --disable-infobars --disable-session-crashed-bubble --no-first-run --check-for-update-interval=31536000 "https://axe.hublanes.biz/auburnhillsvipaxe?kiosk=1"

   Name it HUB Lane Board. Double-click to test — full-screen board, no browser chrome. Alt+F4 closes it.

5. 05

   Launch it at startup

   Press Win + R, run shell:startup, and drop the shortcut into that folder. Reboot: power on → auto-login → board full-screen. That is the whole thing.

6. 06

   Optional watchdog

   Task Scheduler → a task repeating every 5 minutes that relaunches the shortcut if Chrome has died:

   @echo off
   tasklist /FI "IMAGENAME eq chrome.exe" | find /I "chrome.exe" >nul
   if errorlevel 1 start "" "C:\Users\Public\Desktop\HUB Lane Board.lnk"

7. 07

   Label the stick

   Write the venue and activity on it. Three identical sticks with three different URLs is a problem you only want to create once.

What the board handles itself

• Pulls fresh bookings every 60 seconds.
• Keeps the last good schedule on screen if the booking system is unreachable.
• Rolls over to the next day automatically at midnight.
• Reloads itself if the data goes stale for 15 minutes.
• Reloads once a night at 4:00 AM to stay clean and pick up updates.
• Shifts the layout a couple of pixels every 20 minutes to prevent burn-in.
• A very dim dot in the bottom-right corner ticks every minute. If it stops moving, that screen is frozen — power-cycle the stick.

Troubleshooting

Desktop instead of the board

Shortcut isn't in shell:startup, or auto-login is off

Chrome “restore pages?” bar

Missing --disable-session-crashed-bubble

Board loads then goes black

Sleep or screen saver is still enabled

Wrong venue on the TV

Wrong URL in that stick's shortcut

Heartbeat dot stopped

That stick is frozen — power-cycle it

Blank white page

No network at boot; it retries, else power-cycle