PI DISPLAY SLIDESHOW

Raspberry PI slideshow for viewing a set of posters on a large screen display. The posters should be available as a publicly readable Dropbox folder, provided as a download URL to the script.

They can be viewed as a slideshow, with a configurable delay between each poster and the Dropbox folder will be refreshed after a configurable cycle time also. The posters can be rotated 90 degrees for display on a portrait mode monitor, or displayed on a landscape orientation screen either singly or in pairs.

Settings for these options are made in a .ini configuration file by setting variables, which are documented below.

Version

The latest development version is 0.1.9 and the latest release is 0.1.8.

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

Easier specification of source posters
More configuration options
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 should 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 (optional) second argument.

The installation process is as follows:

$ wget https://github.com/grkvlt/pi-display-slideshow/archive/refs/tags/version-0.1.8.tar.gz
...
$ tar zxvf version-0.1.8.tar.gz
pi-display-slideshow-version-0.1.8/
...
$ cd pi-display-slideshow-version-0.1.8
$ 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

For best results, the display screen should be rotated 90 degrees into portrait mode, so that the aspect ratio more closely matches the posters to be displayed.

Usage

The slideshow should start automatically on boot.

Run the slideshow.sh script from a terminal, which should be available on the users PATH after installation. You may need to re-login for this to take effect. If no arguments are provided, the slideshow.ini installed in the same directory as the script will be used, otherwise the first argument should point to a file with the configuration variables for the slideshow.

$ slideshow.sh landscape.ini

Output will be logged to /var/log/slideshow.log or the file specified in the LOGFILE configuration setting. The log contents will contain more detailed information if the DEBUG setting is set to any non-empty value.

INFO 220824213701 Running slideshow process
DEBUG 220824213702 Slideshow PID is 8132 logging at /tmp/slideshow.a139bb.log

Posters

The slideshow linked to by DROPBOX_URL should point to the public download link for an entire folder. This is exported as a .zip archive on Dropbox and Google Drive, but any archive file available over HTTP is suitable. The poster files it contains can be .pdf format or bitmap files such as .jpeg or .png of any resolution. These images will be converted as part of the slideshow processing, but it should be noted that smaller files will download more quickly. The slideshow link is checked regularly every SLIDESHOW_LENGTH minutes, and any new or modified posters will be displayed once the updated archive is downloaded and processed.

Settings

The following variables can be set in the configuration file:

DROPBOX_URL - Dropbox download link for posters
SLIDESHOW_DIR - Folder to save files into (defaults to ./slideshow)
SLIDESHOW_LENGTH - Slideshow length in minutes (defaults to 30)
SLIDESHOW_DELAY - Delay between slides in seconds (defaults to 10)
SLIDESHOW_ROTATE - Rotate posters for portrait mode? (default true)
SLIDESHOW_JOIN - Join two posters with same prefix in landscape mode? (default false)
SCREEN_RES - Hardcoded screen resolution as XXXXxYYY

Debugging and Logging

DEBUG - Enable debugging by setting this variable
FEH_LOG - Logfile location for the slideshow application
LOGFILE - Logfile location for this script (defaults to /var/log/slideshow.log)

Config File

The following configuration should be saved as landscape.ini and can be used to display posters in landscape mode. Pairs of files will be concatenated horizontally and shown together.

# LANDSCAPE
DROPBOX_URL="https://www.dropbox.com/sh/wra6omoa0f12fzj/AADvDwf3ph4ajB4QFrBMv3Qca"
SLIDESHOW_DIR="/posters"
SLIDESHOW_LENGTH="60"
SLIDESHOW_DELAY="15"
SLIDESHOW_ROTATE="false"
SLIDESHOW_JOIN="true"