It's a simple program that will display a series of image files on the framebuffer filling the screen as best as possible.
So.... it's a photo frame? Yes.
The generic itch was that I needed to display a slideshow at remote locations. Each location had a reasonably large flat panel display. With the addition of a Raspberry Pi, a network connection and a cron job to run rsync (to update the images) the system was running.
The specific requirements (in case they are of interest to anyone else) are that I need the slideshow to be easily updated by muggles. This was achieved by mounting a samba shared drive (that they could easily update). The slideshow display had to be able to handle sporadic updates and periods with zero images in the case where someone deletes all the images before copying the new ones. All the install details are included below.
PyGame does all the heavy lifting. It really is pretty awesome.
No. Pretty much any platform that supports PyGame should be fine. I chose the Pi because of price and easy availability (ok, it was mostly price).
Default: 5 seconds
Override the default inter-image delay time.
Example:
delay = 2
Default: pwd
Specify the location for image files. Images are pulled from the immediate directory, no recursive search is found.
Example:
image_directory = /home/timtam/images
Default: False
If true, the discovered files will be shown in alphabetical order. By default, they are displayed in the order in which they are found.
Example:
sort = True
Default: "No Images to show."
A message to display in the event of no images being found in the specified or default locations.
Example:
no\_images_msg = "Image directory is empty"
Default: False
If set to True, the display time for an image may be encoded into the filename itself by enclosing it in parenthesis.
Examples (when duration_in_filename = True)
| Filename | Duration |
|---|---|
| Slide1(12).png | 12 seconds. |
| Image(6)(3).jpg | 3 seconds. |
| Picture.jpg | default delay period. |
| shot6.png | default delay period. |
Cancel the GUI and login to a bash prompt
-
Run
sudo raspi-config -
Select
3 Boot Options -
Select
B2 Text console, automatically logged in a 'pi' user -
Then add the following to /home/pi/.bashrc
cd <timtam_install_dir> ; ./timtam
- Then... reboot
- Needed to enable 32 bit depth on the framebuffer for the raspi:
- Append
bcm2708_fb.fbdepth=32to /boot/cmdline.txt (should be possible by config.txt) - Add
framebuffer_ignore_alpha=1to /boot/config.txt
(If on console, the pi user can run the timtam program. Otherwise, needs to be root.)
Step 1: Open a terminal session and edit inittab file.
sudo nano /etc/inittab
Step 2: To disable the getty program, navigate to the following line in inittab
1:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty 115200 tty1
And add a # at the beginning of the line to comment it out
#1:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty 115200 tty1
Step 3: Add login program to inittab. Add the following line just below the commented line
1:2345:respawn:/bin/login -f pi tty1 </dev/tty1 >/dev/tty1 2>&1
This will run the login program with pi user and without any authentication
Step 4: Save and Exit. Press Ctrl+X to exit nano editor followed by Y to save the file and then press Enter to confirm the filename.
Reboot the pi and it will boot straight on to the shell prompt pi@raspberrypi without prompting you to enter username or password. But this isn't enough; you need your Pi to automatically run some command or a script. which is explained in the next section.
How to automatically run a script after login. Step 1: Open a terminal session and edit the file /etc/profile
sudo nano /etc/profile
Step 2: Add the following line to the end of the file
. /home/pi/your_script_name.sh
replace the script name and path with correct name and path of your start-up script.
Step 3: Save and Exit
Press Ctrl+X to exit nano editor followed by Y to save the file.
Scott Finneran (SierraFoxtrot) scottfinneran+githubATgmailDOTcom