Why I built DisplayValet

I'm Amar Pattani. I was an engineer for twelve years, I've been a dentist for ten, and I've been building things for as long as I can remember. I studied electrical engineering at Northwestern, went to dental school at Marquette, and today I practice family dentistry and orthodontics at Main Street Smiles Dentistry in Barrington, Illinois.

Our reception area has three Samsung Frame TVs side by side, with another in the waiting room. I wanted them to work together: an implant photo on one, how it works on the next, and what it costs on the third, all switching at the same moment. Instead, each TV ran its own slideshow from its own phone app, drifting out of step, and changing a picture meant doing it four times. The signage services I looked at wanted a media player behind every TV and a monthly fee for each screen, for TVs that could already show pictures on their own.

So I built what I wanted. DisplayValet runs on the server that's always on in our office anyway. It runs the reception wall as one screen and the waiting-room Frame on its own, plays the LG TVs in our operatories with nothing plugged in, and handles the Fire TV on our older waiting-room TV. It turns them all on in the morning and off at night, and when a patient finishes watching something in an operatory, it puts our slideshow back.

It has run our office every day since. Other businesses have the same TVs and the same headache, so I've made it available to everyone. Every install starts with a 30-day free trial, because the best way to know whether it works with your TVs is to try it on your TVs.

If something doesn't work the way you'd expect, use Report a problem in the app. It comes straight to me.