Slideshow tool for Raspberry Pi

Simple slideshow tool for use by Team 1518 Raider Robotics for their Raspberry Pi-based pit area TV system.

This tool will copy and automatically resize photos from an SD card to a folder in your home directory. Click a button to start the slideshow.

Installation instructions

ImageMagick

You will need ImageMagick installed. On the Raspberry Pi, in a terminal, enter:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install imagemagick

The feh Screensaver

Next, install feh and xscreensaver:

sudo apt-get install feh
sudo apt-get install xscreensaver

You'll want to configure the screensaver to make sure it keeps the screen on.

Choose Start > Preferences > Screensaver. In the blank out time box, enter 720. This will keep the screensaver running and monitor on for 12 hours.

Node JS and NPM

You'll need NodeJS installed. If you're running NOOBS, you'll need to do the following

wget http://node-arm.herokuapp.com/node_latest_armhf.deb 
sudo dpkg -i node_latest_armhf.deb

If you're running Raspbian, Node (the old legacy version) will probably be installed. You'll need to remove it before doing the steps above.

sudo apt-get remove node-legacy
# then do the wget and dpkg steps above

Finally, install & configure this project

Now, download the project's files to a folder in your home directory:

cd ~
git clone https://github.com/Raider-Robotics-Team-1518/slideshow.git
cd slideshow

(If you don't have Git installed, you can download a zip from the GitHub repository then extract it to a folder in your home directory. An advantage to doing the above, if you ever want to update to the latest published version, you would just do cd ~/slideshow && git pull)

Install the project's dependencies:

npm install

Note: If you're on a locked-down school or corporate network, this might fail with a "certificate not yet valid" error. You'll have to configure node to work via your proxy or speak to your network administrator.

Configure the app to read and write to the correct folders. Open the app's config.json file in a text editor. Most likely, the slideshowDirectory value can be left as-is. You'll need to connect your SD card reader, insert a camera memory card, and figure out the path to that resulting volume. Edit sdCardMountPoint to match that.

{
	"slideshowDirectory": "~/Documents/slideshow/photos",
	"sdCardMountPoint": "/home/pi/mount/",
	"cameraCardName": ""
}

Leave cameraCardName blank unless this app cannot find your SD card during import. In rare cases, you may need to put the SD card's volume name in the config.json file. However, you will then be limited to importing from only that card.

Desktop shortcut

1. Open the File Manager
2. Open the slideshow folder
3. Right-click on slideshow.sh, choose Properties, select the Permissions tab. From the Execute menu, choose Anyone. Click OK
4. Drag the "Slideshow" icon to your desktop

Usage instructions

Function	Description
Importing Pictures	1. Insert your camera's memory card. 2. Click Import pictures from the SD card. 3. Click Import Existing photos will be overwritten if duplicate file names exist. Photos are resized automatically to your match screen's height and width at 70% JPG quality.
Start Slideshow	1. Click the Start the slideshow button 2. Optionally, edit the display time and whether to show photos randomly or sequentially (based on their name). 3. Click Go! To stop the slideshow, right click on a picture and choose Exit.

Credits/License

Written by Tim Poulsen, @skypanther, 2016

License: MIT