Sanity check before purchasing – Raspberry Pi 5 digital signage build for My Chiropractor who is a friend

Other
1

Newbie Here:

I’m building a basic digital signage system using a Raspberry Pi 5 and want to make sure I’m buying the right hardware before checking out.

Current items in my cart:

  • Raspberry Pi 5 Essential Kit – 4GB

  • Raspberry Pi A2-Class microSD card – 64GB

  • Official Raspberry Pi micro-HDMI to HDMI-A cable (2m)

Use case:

  • Single display

  • Chromium browser in kiosk mode

  • Looping a locally hosted React website

  • Runs continuously (business signage)

Questions:

  1. Is the 4GB Pi 5 sufficient for this use case, or should I move to 8GB?

  2. Is an A2-class SD card fine for long-term signage, or should I consider USB/SSD boot instead?

  3. Am I missing anything critical (cooling, power, networking, reliability concerns)?

  4. Any recommended OS for lightweight GUI + Chromium kiosk on Pi 5?

Appreciate any feedback before I place the order.

2

  1. 4GB is fine unless there are a bunch of large video files

  2. A2-class SD should be fine for light-HTML / static-image loops (wear-out reality = ~1–2 years of 24 h writes (logs, Chromium cache) you’ll likely start seeing CRC errors on an SD vs an SSD (should last for several years)

SSD is a simple upgrade, just grab anM.2 NVMe-to-PCIe “Hat” (we’re currently sold out)) and a 128 GB SSD. Boot from SD, put the React build + Chromium cache on the SSD, or flash the new “SD-to-USB/SSD” beta in raspi-config

If you stay with the SD card only, enable tmpfs for /var/log and Chromium’s disk cache dir — this cuts SD writes by ~70 %.

  1. Cooling & power – Pi 5 thermals throttle at ≈ 85 °C; under continuous 4 K output the SoC sits ~75 °C with the official active cooler and 38 °C ambient .

Add the $5 fan Raspberry Pi Active Cooler - SparkFun Electronics

Use the 27 W USB-C supply that ships with the kit; keeps the board from potentially browning-out

Use ethernet instead of WiFi if possible; reduces latency

  1. Easiest route for a basic OS:

    1. Flash Raspberry Pi OS Lite (64-bit).

    2. sudo apt install --no-install-recommends xserver-xorg chromium-browser openbox lightdm.

    3. One autostart file:

bash

# /etc/xdg/openbox/autostart
chromium-browser --kiosk --disable-restore-session-state --disable-features=VizDisplayCompositor --disable-translate --no-first-run file:///home/pi/signage/build/index.html
  1. Enable watchdog (dtparam=watchdog=on + apt install watchdog) so a hung tab reboots the board.

If you’d rather not hand-craft, ready-made images also exist, look around online