All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Raspberry Pi Photo Frame
raindog308
Administrator, Veteran
raindog308 said: Bereft of other ideas for my wife's Christmas present, I've started this project. Pi 3 is inbound...need to find a monitor.
Goal is a display that has various sections (kind of like the Win 8/10 Metro screen) displaying various things continuously:
family photos
reminders of upcoming events
the weather
sports scores
top rated drama threads on LET
blah blah whatever other cool APIs I can scrape
I've seen various RPi digital photo frame projects, so I don't think this will actually be huge work. I haven't looked at touchscreen but this may be "view only" given that with the pi, power, SD card, etc I'm at $50 and a monitor is going to be another $100-150 or more.
So I actually did this, but my grandeur was somewhat scaled back.
I've got an ASUS 22" monitor with a RPi 3 on the back. Got about 1,000 family images (paid teenage daughter to sort through all the family pics) plus a few hundred other inspirational or other holiday pics.
At midnight, I have a job that plans the day. It creates file lists (120 for each hour, as image changes every 30 seconds) and then on an hourly basis, there is a job that kills any fbi session and starts a new one for that hour. 'fbi' is the Raspberry Pi frame buffer viewer - uses the whole screen.
So it's not "here are these windows and data for them" but rather "here is a list of 1920x1080 jpg files I've generated, please show them in this order".
Random family photos were easy...I backed off on the whole API thing though. The problem is that fbi starts with a list of photos and cycles through them as a slideshow (with pause, dissolve, etc.) So if you want to switch images (because the weather report has changed) you have to kill fbi and restart, which is pretty ugly on the display.
The fbi source is kind of intimidating (it's system C) but I haven't really plowed into it. I'd like to find a full-screen viewer that lets you change the order of images at any time...for now, it's an hourly pre-set. I could still do things on an hourly basis...only takes 4-5 mins to generate everything. I figured the goal was to get the base setup and then I could improve it.
I wrote a little web interface and with samba, my wife can drag images to the pi and then run a reindex job through the web interface, reboot/reset/shutdown, etc.
I went down the path of tagging photos with IPTC but eventually just put them in different folders. The daily image list generations does a fair amount of resizing and placing images on random backgrounds, etc. The software is season-aware - so Christmas images are shown now, but not in October when Halloween images will be shown, etc.
All in all, pretty easy project...had fun doing it. Many more features I could add - buttons to pause/skip pics, bluetooth controls using a Wiimote, etc.
I'd post some pics but...it's just a monitor with a Raspberry Pi on the back :-)
Comments
pic or didnt happen
pfft. Get an old DOS laptop, CSHOW 2000, and build it directly into the wall for extra load bearing goodness.