| About: |
Creating a Public Display showing a slideshow, time, weather and an RSS feed, in a way that pictures can be easily updated.
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| Start date: |
18/02/2013 |
| Last changed: |
14/05/2013 |
INDEX
All YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THIS PROJECT
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HARDWARE REQUIRED
- Raspberry Pi
- 5V power supply + micro-usb
- SD CARD with OpenELEC installed and working !
- HDMI cable
- A big HDMI screen, or a small one ;-)
- network cable
- a windows share where you can put those pictures
HOW-TO
first thing to do:
- configure weather: add location
- enable ssh: system: OpenELEC: Services: start ssh server at boot
- enable crond at boot: system: OpenELEC: Services: start cron daemon at boot
- configure appearance: skin : start with window => weather
- add-on add: screen saver: slideshow
- pictures add location => add your windows share with smb (save user and password)
- configure screensaver => slideshow: use Image Folder, choose folder (now you will see your added windows share)
- configure screensaver => start within 1 minute.
probably your pictures will look bad (have a bad resolution the second time they are loaded), we need to fix this by altering a xml file so that it uses 1080 resolution cash.
- login with ssh into your openelec (user: root password: openelec)
nano /storage/.xbmc/userdata/advancedsettings.xml
now add this to the file and save:
<advancedsettings>
<imageres>1080</imageres>
</advancedsettings>
when done, you need to clear image cash
rm /storage/.xbmc/userdata/Database/Textures*.db
rm -rf /storage/.xbmc/userdata/Thumbnails/*
Now kill xbmc (xbmc will restart automagicly)
killall xbmc.bin
Now we need to make the screensaver stop and show the weather (or something else) every x minutes. There for we will write a short batch script that will be ran every x minutes by the cron daemon. (you should already have crond enabled)
nano /storage/xbmc-script.sh
now add this to the file and save:
#!/bin/bash
#
# check http://www.JO3RI.be
#
#Open the given window in xbmc, after the screensaver has started
xbmc-send --action='ActivateWindow(Weather)'
Let's make it executable:
chmod +x /storage/xbmc-script.sh
Now let's add this to a cronjob:
crontab -e
now add this to the file and save. Here we are we are calling the script every 5 minutes, change in what you like.
# Crontab
#
# check http://www.JO3RI.be
#
#let's run this command like every 5 minutes (replace the 5 by what ever you want
*/5 * * * * /bin/bash /storage/xbmc-script.sh
The basic skin file is in the read only file system, so we can't change it. Don't worry, we only need to copy it to our own folder and make those changes there. When we reboot, xbmc will use the skin settings from our own userdata folder.
cp -R /usr/share/xbmc/addons/skin.confluence/ /storage/.xbmc/addons/
Now let's add the Rssfeed to the weather channel (if you update xbmc or the skin, these changes will probably be lost) and remember this is skin dependent. So if you change skins, you'll have to alter the correct xml file too)
Now paste the orange lines just above <include>CommonNowPlaying</include> into the file and save:
