Polygon.io has put a Wall St.-like ticker tape on top and inside of their office building. Initial commercial quotes were $140k and above, too much.

After much discussion, we asked ourselves if we could make one using commodity hardware and open-source software. Use cheap computers (Raspberry Pis?), normal computer screens and we have all the stock data we could possibly need. We decided to pilot the idea on the inside of the office since outdoor hardware would take additional research.

We wanted to use raspberry pis for the nodes. Although it worked fine running on a Raspberry Pi, making the wiring look nice and clean wasn’t possible. Instead, we purchased some old used Dell OptiPlex 7040 machines for ~$100/ea.

All totaled, the hardware for the setup costs around $6,800 USD. Not exactly cheap, but much more affordable than the alternatives.

You can read more in the article and see the code on GitHub.