BeTheater
A full cinema back office on a €60 device, with no cloud and no monthly bill.
- CLIENT
- Tria Asteria Cinema
- YEAR
- 2024
- OUR ROLE
- Software, hardware build, thermal printing, remote access
- TECHNOLOGIES
- Laravel, MySQL, NGINX
01 / Overview
Tria Asteria Cinema runs four screens with a single box office. They wanted one system for screenings, seat selection, ticket sales at the desk and online with card payment, and daily reporting, with three hard constraints: no cloud, no monthly costs, and it must keep selling tickets when the internet goes down.
02 / The challenge
Cloud hosting at €50 or more a month made no sense for a small cinema, and an internet outage on a Saturday night cannot stop the box office. The thermal receipt printers used at the desk do not speak Greek, and the cinema has no static IP, so remote access for the owner had to work without opening a single port.
03 / What we built
The cashier is a Raspberry Pi
We built the point-of-sale terminal ourselves: a Raspberry Pi 4 with a touchscreen, a barcode/QR scanner for checking tickets and a thermal printer, running Ubuntu Server with NGINX, MySQL and PHP and the Laravel application deployed directly on the device. Everything the cinema needs runs on the desk, with or without internet.
Seat maps drawn by the cinema
A visual editor for each screen: rows and columns, seats, aisles, wheelchair places, inactive seats and named sections, all editable by the staff. Tickets at the desk and online sell from the same map, so a seat can never be sold twice. Online buyers pay by card through the cinema's own bank, so the money goes straight to the owner's account.
Greek on a thermal printer
ESC/POS printers like the EPSON TM-T20III have no Greek code page by default. We wrote an encoding layer that converts Greek UTF-8 text to Code Page 737, handles accents and wraps lines for receipt width. Tickets print correctly in under a second.
Remote access without a static IP
A Cloudflare Tunnel opens a secure, outbound-only connection from the Pi. The owner checks sales and reports from anywhere, with no VPN and no port forwarding.
04 / Results
Eight months in production without a day of downtime, €0 a month in hosting, tickets printed in under a second, and staff who learned the system in a single afternoon.