Thursday, March 6, 2014

Raspberry Pi Picture Frame Post 1

To go along with my Google site https://sites.google.com/site/betzmobileengineering/ I thought it would be good to have some blog posts to go along with the finished projects.

From the name of this post you should have figured out what this project is but let me go a little more in depth. What I wanted to build is a idea that my brother came up with. He wanted a digital picture frame that you could change the pictures from remotely. After he put this idea into my head I started figuring out how I would do it. Basically my theory of operation is as follows.

  • Raspberry pi is the core to the project
  • Wifi for internet access
  • Some how I wanted to get pictures that are stored in gdrive.
  • Use an old computer monitor as a screen
  • I also wanted to be able to display the current and future weather, possibly for different locations
After doing some research I found different projects that had different parts of my overall project. The following websites are where I got help from for different parts of the project.
The Posts for this are going to be a little out of order. Normally A rough setup would be next but I have that done and don't have any pictures to go with it. I plan on going through the installation again that way I can keep all of the extra stuff that did not work off of the sd card.

6 comments:

  1. Hi Greg,
    Thanks for your post about the frame, I'm busy building my own and your steps are very helpful. I have a question regarding the synching of only a subfolder in your Google Drive. I can't seem to find out how you do it, and I can't find it in your scripts. Care to shed some light on that?
    Thanks,
    Reinhardt

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  2. Reinhardt, Whatever folder you installed grive to the should be a file called grive. To run the sync type "./grive" (no quotes) while in the install folder

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  3. Hi Greg,
    I was more wondering about synching only a single Drive folder with a directory on my Pi. I managed it now (I had some sort of Locale problem on the Pi). I'm saving a lot of downloading time now using this code: [ ./grive -s PhotoFramePhotos ]
    That basically only syncs the one folder that I keep my photos in on Drive (A folder called PhotoFramePhotos).
    I'm still trying to get the resizing and stuff working the way I want it, but I'll get there.

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    Replies
    1. Reinhardt. Fair Warning, I seem to be having an issue with the sd card slowly filling up even though I know that there should still be free space on it. I haven't been able to figure out why yet

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  4. Thanks for the warning. It's not because of the fbi memory leak is it? I assume not since that process is restarted every time you sync.

    I've taken a slightly different approach using your guide as a starting point:
    1. I sync a folder called Downloads with a specific folder in GDrive.
    2. I compare the images in a folder called Slideshow (where I store my slideshow images). Any photos that no longer exist in Download are deleted.
    3. I resize the photos in Download, but only if they don't exist in Slideshow, and then copy them to Slideshow.

    I realise that this creates two copies of every file in my slideshow (one original and one resized), but I don't see this as a problem, I have enough space I think. If space becomes an issue, I can always change to a one-way sync somehow, and edit the original files... Will have to figure out how to do that though.

    And today I just wondered why I didn't just install XBMC and use the slideshow function included in that :-) Would have been much faster, but less fun.

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  5. It shouldnt be the memory leak in fbi, especially since I restart it every day at 2 am. When I Sync I then resize the images and move them to a different folder. Then I resync. I think the issue is cause by resizing but it is hard to troubleshoot from 700 miles from the picture frame. I will probably reinstall all the software on a different pi to troubleshoot. The easy way is never the fun way

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