PicframeBoard

A Digital Picture Frame With Magic Mirror Integration And Hardware/Mobile Phone Based Interfaces

This project describes a digital picture frame that also works as a personalized dashboard for the home that can be interacted with either via a mobile-friendly website or physical buttons on the frame.

Hardware

• FYHXele 32-inch 4K IPS monitor (a gaming monitor with a matte screen, speakers, an IR remote and a USB-C connector to power the PI)
• Enclosed and heatsink'd RPI 4 with 8GB RAM but the 4GB version will also work in general. The 2GB version did not work reliably (the dashboard feature crashed the pi more often than not)
• Any reasonably sized SD Card to hold the OS and a USB 3.1 flash drive to host photos (recommended to improve the SD Card's lifespan for the photo shuffling feature)
• Two momentary push-buttons wired to the RPI's GPIO to support switching between applications and restarting the picture frame
• Low profile, 100mm VESA wall-mount and a 90-degree swivel adapter to allow the frame to run in portrait mode
• A thoughtfully-built oak frame gifted by a wonderful family member

Software

• Raspbian OS Buster
  • PictureFrame powered by pi3d (2024.05.31)
  • MagicMirror(2.26.0)
    • Runs as a systemd service
    • MMM-Remote-Control module is recommended which supports an easy to use, local-network phone interface to the frame
  • xdotool a Linux CLI tool used to toggle between the active application
  • picframe_sync_googlephotos.sh script that runs as a cron job and uses rclone to download a random set of photos from a specific google album.
    • Allows for config of how many total photos to store locally and how many photos to download at one time
    • If the local folder reaches its total photos limit the script chooses a random selection of enough photos to delete from the picture frame before continuing to download the new set
  • picframe_buttonwatcher.py python systemd service that runs on startup and monitors the momentary push buttons connected to the RPI's GPIO
  • picframe_windowmanager.py python helper script that uses xdotool under the hood to manage switching between PictureFrame and MagicMirror
  • picframe_boot.sh configured to run at startup this script orchestrates the startup of the picture frame's main applications as well as the picframe_buttonwatcher systemd service which requires all apps to be running
  • RPi.GPIO python package used by picframe_buttonwatcher.py

ToDo

• Characterize Raspbian lock-up more thoroughly when using SD Card versus USB flash drive for photo storage
• Test with GPIO3 to add shutdown/wakeup pushbutton support
• Portrait-mode software support
• MagicMirror module to support app-switching via web interface that MMM-Remote-Control module provides