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Video Tutorial coming this weekend! And welcome
🕑 Added 2022-02-09 07:30:38 +0000 UTCI want to thankyou and welcome all of you! I'm working with some of you on getting the installs working, and realize that a video walkthrough will help out immensely so I'll work on that this weekend.
Please note there is an 'instructions' post that has a pdf and word doc version of my write up of how to get things going. I'll be updating that as I get questions and feedback, that will have some great info in it for things from usage to how to get setup. Also this is officially supported on a pi4 2gig or higher. If you run it on less I'll do what I can for you, but you may hit segmentation faults due to memory constraints and such. Also please try to keep images at 4k or less (it'll display at 1080p, but on a 4k tv the upscaler can make 4k artwork look nice...however you start to push the memory limits of the lower end pis...the technical reason for this is that I have 4 'images' stacked on top of each other to do the transition effects, so you're not just pushing one 4k image, but 2 full 4k images and then 2 more lower res 'blurred' images...and then the system is animating them all at the same time)
This is my first time doing anything like this. I want to thank all of you for believing in this project and helping it go forward, and for your patience as I work through stuff. Once I get things situated and smoothed out then I can really work to deliver value and more.
Some quick tips from questions that have been asked:
If you're using home automation to control the boards, the 'log' has blue highlights of anything you click on to show you what the web equivalent is. You can put the http://ip address in front and then control the frames in that way from home automation or other types of controls. For instance: replace this ip with your frames to turn it on, or change it to 'false' to turn it off:
http://192.168.1.82/command/?COMMAND=SCREENSTATE&VALUE=true
Another thing that was asked was about taking control of the boards to get back into the linux stuff that is hidden. For looks I've removed the start menu bar and configure it to be as hidden as possible which can make some tasks tough. To bring it back:
rm -r /home/pi/.config/lxpanel
lxpanelctl restart
Also if you are using VNC, the password is either Dynaframe or dynaframe for the root user 'pi'
One other quick thing...this was designed to not need any setup on the frame itself. But when it boots, it may boot in a wrong orientation...to correct that..once it's connected to wifi (connect to the frame access point and enter your credentials for your wifi and then reboot) then you can change the orientation. After an orietnation change you MAY have to reboot one more time. I'm working on removing the need to reboot. These reboots can be done from the webUI.
The "now loading" page is actually the raspberry pi desktop background. I debated on leaving the background black, but I feel that having that there is useful to give feedback that the OS is loaded, and that the splash video should follow. If you see the 'now loading' for any period of time (over ten seconds) then something has gone with the loading.
To quickly troubleshoot or to load it yourself, you can do the following (for this troubleshooting you will need a keyboard/mouse plugged into the frame and will run these on the frame itself..this is only for troubleshooting)
cd Dynaframe from a command window to change directly from 'home' to 'home\Dynaframe'
sudo ./Dynaframe to launch it. (I run it as superuser to give it control of port 80, and so it can run some other administrative tasks it needs to do)
If you run it that way, you'll see the log output directly in the console on the frame. That log is immensely helpful if something goes wrong, a phone pic can be emailed to me to make it easy to get me the info of what's going on if it crashes for any reason.
I have a tester qwiksilver who runs this on several configs, and I run it across 3-4 configs constantly so we test as much as we can before releases. That being said, even with 5-6 configs and the same exact hardware it's tough to test against all possible combinations so we may hit issues here and there. My commitment is that I'll make them a priority to get them figured out with you so that you can get to enjoying your artwork on the frame :)
If you ever have questions, feedback, or even want to chat or share your setup please let me know and feel free to contact me on here or email (joe@geek-toolkit.com). I want to provide the best service possible to my supporters!
Comments
Joe Farro
I'm glad you got setup easily! I put a ton of work and focus into that..it was one of my personal pain points with other solutions, and with my github version. The 'video engine' is simply VLC in the background...I used to use OMXPlayer which was really great however it is getting deprecated in future versions of Raspbian, and i'd like to move to them because they give a perf boost (plus to keep things secure). But that being said, whenever I see issues I typically go to a console (control/alt 'T') and then launch VLC (it's installed in the image) and then use the UI to test the video format out directly on the frame. I also try the video in the windows version or on another OS. That usually tells me: 1) Is it a VLC software issue 2) Is it a graphic / performance issue (the pi gets very stretched even though it claims 4k30...it doesn't take much to put stress on it) I recommend 1080p .h264 encoded videos if you can pull that off, but I put VLC in there in hopes that it'd be less restrictive than OMXPlayer (which REALLY limited things sadly..). One other note, when testing on the pi with VLC make sure to full screen it...I found the performance with video that wasn't full screen was...not great. Please let me know if that works out.
It's funny, I just got done a few days ago mounting a very large tv vertically on my wall for this exact purpose. Like literally on Monday. The TV is a bit old and it has a couple of failing electronic components that make it unsuitable for watching TV anymore, but it makes a very dramatic wall frame. I came across this project a day after you posted it. I've installed the software and I'm impressed at how turnkey the installation process is. The UI is still a bit rough around the edges obviously, but the setup seems genuinely well thought out. The startup animation alone felt kind of slick. I'm looking forward to the project. Do you have any advice on video encoding issues. I haven't dug into this much, but I noticed that the software doesn't like to play nice with some .mp4 videos even though it plays nice with others. I'm aware of the unfortunate nonstandard weirdness of containers and encodings, but I'm wondering if there are any obvious things I aught to be doing, whether it's the details of the format or re-encoding video in a specific way.
