How-To: Simple RPi Display Board (Showcase)

How-To: Simple RPi Display Board (Showcase)

The concept:

We wanted a simple display board to showcase some of our company brands at my place of work.  This would be run from a Raspberry Pi 3 (model b+) and be hooked up to a 40" HDTV.  The Pi would be running the standard Raspbian OS image (https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian/)

Initially this was completed using a Chromium extension called "Revolver - Tabs". The idea being that the various brands (websites) could be fired up in multiple tabs and the revolver extension would simply loop through them.  This worked fine for about 10 tabs however the transitions weren't great and the more tabs we added the slower things got and the worse the display board looked.

The Pi began to struggle so it was time to look for a new solution. Google was my friend here - I ran a simple search (something along the lines of "Raspberry Pi 3 Showcase Display Board").  Introducing FEH.

FEH is a small program designed to simply read and display images stored on a USB stick or directly on the Pi.

Below you will find a small guide on how I built a simple Raspberry Pi display board to showcase many of our company brands.

Instructions:

• Once the OS is loaded on the Pis SD card pop it into your Pi and hook it up to a monitor.
• Boot the Pi and await the desktop
• Ensure the Pi is connected to your network at this point (you won't need a network to run the Pi once FEH is installed).
• Open a Terminal window
• Run the following command: sudo apt-get install feh
• Breakdown of the above command:
• sudo = run the following command as super user to allow installation
• apt-get = download the latest package from the internet
• install = you know what this one does...
• feh = the application you with to install
• Once installed it's important to disable the Raspberry Pi's screensaver (you can do this in the preferences window)
• Download and store your images (in this example the images were simply stored direct to the Raspberry Pi on the desktop).
• Jump back into the Terminal and run the following command: feh -Y -x -q -D 5 -B black -F -Z -z -r \desktop\ (you may need to play around with the folder (directory) location on the end of this to get it working for you).
• Breakdown of the above command:
• feh = the application you want to run
• -Y = Hide the pointer (cursor)
• -x = Borderless
• -q = Be quiet with no error reporting
• -D = Slide dleay in seconds (followed by 5 in this example)
• -B = background image / colour (in this example it's black)
• -F = Fullscreen
• -Z = Auto Zoom
• Press Q to exit FEH from running when done.

I will attempt to extend this project by seeing how this could be used in different scenarios. one idea springing to mind already is:

• Buying a smaller 7" display screen and running family photos via FEH at home (digital picture frame)

How would you use FEH?