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Raspberry Pi Slideshow

Once I needed to do a slideshow on the Raspberry Pi with the following requirements

  • free
  • transitions (effects)
  • some options (speed, delay, ...)

But couldn't find any good solution...

So I decided to use a website with php to display the slideshow.

There are 2 main drawbacks with this approach:

  • some setup/installation is required (setting up stuff for the website)
    • however you can modify the setup and e.g. not use nginx and use only php
  • because the browser is used to display the website there are some performance penalties
    • some transitions are not smooth on the Raspberry Pi (I used the 3rd Version)
      • but because this is only a Website it can be used with any device that can display a browser (and run php)

The Idea

The idea is to use jQuery and the jQuery cycle plugin to display the slideshow in the browser.
We use php to look for images in the images folder and reference the images in the generated website or we use just image urls.

Further we need to disable any screensaver else our slideshow will turn black after some time.

The last steps are for a advanced setup where we use ssh to start/stop the slideshow on the Raspberry Pi and also turn on/off the connected Display.

If you know how to do these steps you can just grab the code and deploy it.

Setup/Installation

This was tested on the Raspberry Pi 3 B with Raspian Stretch (9)

Also note that I could not test this steps because my Raspiberry now runs the slideshow 24/7

Make sure the Raspberry is connected to your network

If you read execute then you need to open a terminal and run the described commands

Install Raspian Stretch

There are many instructions how to install Raspian, I just want to mention that https://www.balena.io/etcher/ is an easy tool to flash Raspian to the SD card.

Disable screensaver

From https://www.elektronik-kompendium.de/sites/raspberry-pi/2107011.htm

execute

nano .config/lxsession/LXDE-pi/autostart

insert the lines

@xset s noblank
@xset s off
@xset -dpms

reboot and execute

xset q

the output should be something like

Screen Saver:
prefer blanking:  no ...
...
DPMS is Disabled

Install chromium (already present on Respian Stretch)

You can use another browser for this but then you need to adjust the scripts (described later)

execute

sudo apt-get install chromium-browser

Maker sure you can run the browser by executing

chromium-browser

so we can later open the browser via scripts.

Install nginx

From https://willy-tech.de/nginx-auf-raspberry-pi-installieren-einrichten/ and https://electrodrome.net/debian-9-stretch-php-7-0-und-nginx-auf-dem-raspberry-pi-installieren-und-einrichten/

sudo apt-get install nginx

start nginx

/etc/init.d/nginx start

The normal directory for the webserver is /var/www/html but we can use ony other directory if we want.

Execute

sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/default

and find the server { part and make sure it looks like this (lines starting with # can be ignored)

...

server {
        listen 80 default_server;
        listen [::]:80 default_server;

        # here you can specify the root path for the webserver (where we place the slideshow)
        root /var/www/html;

        # Add index.php to the list if you are using PHP
        index index.html index.htm index.nginx-debian.html index.php;

        server_name _;

        location / {
                # First attempt to serve request as file, then
                # as directory, then fall back to displaying a 404.
                try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
        }

        # pass PHP scripts to FastCGI server
        #
        location ~ \.php$ {
                include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;

                # With php-fpm (or other unix sockets):
                # if you don't use php7 you need to change the path here!
                fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php7.0-fpm.sock;
                # With php-cgi (or other tcp sockets):
                # fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
        }

        # deny access to .htaccess files, if Apache's document root
        # concurs with nginx's one
        #
        location ~ /\.ht {
                deny all;
        }
}
...

Install php 7

sudo apt-get install php7.0 php7.0-cli php7.0-cgi php7.0-common php7.0-curl php7.0-dev php7.0-fpm php7.0-gd php7.0-mcrypt php7.0-json php7.0-tidy php7.0-sqlite3 php7.0-opcache php7.0-intl php7.0-zip php7.0-xml php7.0-mbstring php-pear

then restart nginx (to load the new config)

/etc/init.d/nginx restart

Copy the slideshow project

clone or copy the this repo in /var/www/html or where you specified your webserver root directory

Specify the images

The 1st source for the images is in the file index.php in the variable $imgUrls.
If you want to include images from the web you can add entries to the array e.g.

$imgUrls = [
    'http://path-to-my-image.png',
    'http://path-to-my-2nd-image.png',
]

If there are no urls specified then only the 2nd (local) images are taken.

The 2nd source for the images is the local images/ folder in the repo.
All Images placed in this server (and not starting with a .) are included in the slideshow. The image type should not matter as long as the browser can display this image type.

Note that the images are stretched to the full display size.
To change this you can play around with the css in css/fixes.css

To change the color of the background behind the images open index.php and find the part body { there you can change the line background-color: rgb(83, 87, 96); to any other color

Test

Now open chromium and go to the url http://localhost and the slideshow should start

Options

To see all possible transitions open the url http://localhost/all.php

To change the transition choose the ones you like from http://localhost/all.php and open the file index.php and find the line fx: 'uncover'

Then replace the uncover with your transition names from http://localhost/all.php and separate them by comma

e.g. if I want scrollUp, scrollHorz and slideX the line should be

fx: 'scrollUp,scrollHorz,slideX'

The option speed: 2000 specifies the speed of the transition

The option timeout: 10000 specifies the delay before the next image is displayed

You can also set random: 0 to 1 so that the next images is chosen randomly

For more options see cycleOptions.md or http://jquery.malsup.com/cycle/options.html

Advanced setup

If you have no access to the raspberry once after the setup, it might be a good solution to setup remote access.

This is also a good solution if you want to start/stop the slideshow from another pc.

The other pc must have ssh installed!

Also make sure the Pi has a static ip (local ip).

Setup ssh

execute

sudo raspi-config

choose 5 Interfacing Options then SSH and enable it.

To get the ip from the pi execute

ifconfig

If the Pi is connected via LAN look for eth0: and inet 192.168.X.X is the ip If the Pi is connected via WLAN look for wlan0: and inet 192.168.X.X is the ip

Then switch to another pc and try to ssh (ssh [email protected]) to the pi with the credentials

User: pi
Password: raspberry

If this is not working open the file /etc/ssh/sshd_config and search for PermitRootLogin set it to yes

Then restart the ssh deamon (execute)

/etc/init.d/ssh restart

Setup scripts

If ssh is working you can copy the scripts in this repo in scripts/respberry/ to the desktop (/home/pi/Desktop/)

Before copying make sure the ip in the scripts at scripts/client/ matches the ip of the Pi. So it should be

ssh [email protected] 'bash /home/pi/Desktop/start_slides.sh'

in start_slideshow.sh and

ssh [email protected] 'bash /home/pi/Desktop/stop_slides.sh'

in stop_slideshow.sh.

Also copy the scripts in this repo in scripts/client/ to any client that needs to start/stop the slideshow, the directory is not important

For all scripts make sure they have the x flag set so you can execute them.

To check open the terminal and cd to the locations of the scritps and execute bash ls -la

then in front of the scripts is should look like this

-rwxr-xr-x  2 pi pi 4096 Sep  7 18:53 start.sh

#not

-rw-r--r--  2 pi pi 4096 Sep  7 18:53 start.sh

#(note the 3 missing x)

to change this execute for every script where the x flag is missing

chmod +x start.sh

Make sure you cannected to the Pi at least once via ssh before because there might be a welcome message displayed from ssh or fingerprint stuff?

If you now run the script start_slideshow.sh then you need to login and the slideshow should start

To run the script you can open a terminal and execute

bash start_slideshow.sh

or you can setup double click on the file on the desktop,

see https://askubuntu.com/questions/138908/how-to-execute-a-script-just-by-double-clicking-like-exe-files-in-windows

Advanced^2 setup

If you don't want to type in the ssh password every time you can create a ssh key and use this for login

this needs to be executed on every pc that should have access to the Pi without password.

Fist check if you already have a ssh-key, execute

ls -al ~/.ssh

if this is empty you have no old keys.

If you have old keys make sure to choose a different name for the key pair (when executing ssh-keygen)

Then execute

ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C "some comment from you e.g. for pi"

If you don't type in a passphrase then you don't need to enter anything when connecting to the Pi.

The key pair is now under ~/.ssh/id_rsa (assuming this is your first key pair and you don't changed the location)
(where ~/ is your home directory e.g. /Users/pi)

Then execute

ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa [email protected]

Then check if ssh is working without a password, execute

ssh [email protected]

If not, see https://www.ssh.com/ssh/copy-id

It also might be a good idea to disable ssh root login via password
Then only pcs with a ssh key will be able to login into the Pi via ssh.

Open /etc/ssh/sshd_config on the Pi and change PermitRootLogin to No.

Hints

One can enable (1) or disable (0) the Raspberry Pi HDMI port via

vcgencmd display_power 0
vcgencmd display_power 1

Projects used

default images: