PI DISPLAY EVENTS

Raspberry PI code for displaying HTML file listing events on a monitor. The events are exported from a Google Sheets document published to the web using the Share menu.

Version

The latest development version is 0.1.2 and the latest release is 0.1.1.

This software is provided as Open Source using the Apache 2.0 license and is currently maintained by Andrew Kennedy. All contributions are welcome, including bug reports and pull requests, at the project's GitHub page.

TODO

Automatic control over size of rendered page
Better documentation

Install

Download the install artifacts and extract the contents, then run the install.sh script as root. The target directory to install to can be specified as the first argument to the script. If the configuration file is to be owned by a user other than pi then this should be given as the second argument.

The installation process is as follows:

$ wget https://github.com/grkvlt/pi-display-events/archive/refs/tags/version-0.1.0.tar.gz
...
$ tar zxvf version-0.1.1.tar.gz
pi-display-events-version-0.1.1/
...
$ cd pi-display-events-version-0.1.1
$ sudo ./install.sh /opt/display
...

Installation can take several minutes, or longer on a slow connection or older Raspberry Pi.

Configuration

Configure the Raspberry PI as follows:

no screenblank
ssh/vnc enabled

The startup script in /events/events.sh should be edited to define the CHROMIUM_OPTS values to use according to the screen size and resolution, and the specific chromium-browser line to use should be uncommented. Generally the https://localhost/events.html version is best.

Edit the /var/www/html/events.html file to specify the id of the venue. This file can also be modified to define the URLS fetched for each venue. Additionally, the alignment and size of the events display should be altered here to better match the screen size and resolution being used. The CSS on line 32 specifies this:

transform: translate(1000px, 500px) scale(2.0, 2.0);

Usage

The browser should start automatically on boot. Otherwise run the events.sh script from a terminal.

$ /opt/display/events.sh

Credits

The spreadsheet code that produces the HTML for displaying events was provided by Jon Haines.