pepa65/bulletin

piscreen

Displaying a webpage on a screen by a Raspberry Pi

bulletin

Running a Google slide show with a top info bar on a screen attached to a Raspberry Pi

• Required: sudo apt-get grep sed cron libraspberrypi-bin(vcgencmd)[displ] git surf unclutter xdotool lxsession php-cli coreutils(cd mkdir mv cp chmod head ln)
• Repo: https://gitlab.com/pepa65/bulletin
• If the display needs to be refreshed after a slides change or for some other reason, go to: http://SITE/refresh.php (SITE is IP:PORT).
• The script refr can be run to refresh the browser.
• The script displ can be run to turn the display on or off.
• The script show controls the start & stop of the browser and web server. (See show --help for all options.)

Function

• For piscreen a specified URL is displayed in the browser on startup.
• For bulletin a Google Slides presentation is running in the browser in an iframe with a bar on top with logo, title, time and AQI. This is served by a webserver from web/index.html.
• In both cases, the browser is started through the LXDE lxsession autostart file, which calls show (also starting a web server to serve bulletin and refresh.php).

Install

Raspberry OS

Install Raspberry OS. Use raspi-config to configure the wireless connection. Enabling an ssh server is recommended for remote access.

Screen

For the bulletin the web/index.html file assumes a certain screen size. Configure the screen resolution with raspi-config (Advanced, Resolution). If the display needs to be rotated, add a line like this to /boot/config.txt:

display_hdmi_rotate 3

(Using 3 rotates the display 90 degrees counter-clockwise and 1 clockwise).

If there is overscan (content not aligning well with screen edges), the setoverscan tool can be used from https://github.com/pepa65/setoverscan

Automated Install

• Download the file https://gitlab.com/pepa65/bulletin/raw/master/INSTALL with wget: wget -qO INSTALL 4e4.win/piscreen
• Edit the top of INSTALL to have either URL or GSURL defined.
• Then the whole manual install can be skipped by doing: bash INSTALL

Manual Install

Studying what happens in INSTALL will give more clues as to what is needed..!

Home directory

The assumption is that the user is pi with home directory /home/pi. The file autostart and displ need to be changed if not!

Packages

Install all the required packages:

apt install git surf unclutter xdotool lxsession php-cli libraspberrypi-bin

Download

Clone the git repo:

mkdir -p ~/git; cd ~/git; git clone https://gitlab.com/pepa65/bulletin; cd bulletin

Autostart

The file autostart for the lxsession autostart file needs to be linked in:

Watch out for a different directory under lxsession!

lxconfdir=~/.config/lxsession/LXDE; mkdir -p "$lxconfdir"

ln -sf "$PWD/autostart" "$lxconfdir"

Set URL

cp _show show

At the top of show set SITE (IP:PORT with IP of the Pi and desired PORT). (Suitable IP addresses can be gleaned by: ip a |grep -o 'inet[^ ]* [^/]*'.)

• For bulletin replace GSURL with the base URL of the Google Slides in file web/index.html (after cp web/_index.html web/index.html).
• For piscreen set the URL in show!**

Set screentimes

Add crontab lines to turn the screen on & off at certain times: crontab -l |grep -q bulletin/displ && { crontab -l; echo -e "\n# Display On at 7:00 Mo-Fr on a schoolday\n0 7 * * 1-5 $repo/displ"; echo -e "\n# Display Off at 17:00 Mo-Fr\n0 17 * * 1-5 $repo/displ off\n";} |crontab -