Picture Frame from a TV and RaspberryPi

Hardware used

Raspberry PI 3B+ you could also use a Pi Zero W, I already had the PI

Sceptre E205W-1600 2020 20″ 75Hz

VideoSecu LCD LED Monitor TV Wall Mount

Short HDMI cable

Software used

Raspbian

Eye of Gnome

SFTP to map a drive to my Chromebook so I can just take new photos and drag them over into the folder.

SWISH installed on a windows PC or SFTP NET Drive so you can use SFTP like a mounted drive and and not install anything else on the Pi. Not something I needed but its here in case I change my mind or someone else wants an idea.

Installed raspbian.

Pricing out a twenty inch digital picture frame on Amazon they were in the $200 to $300 range. I put this together for under $125. It also lets me use wireless to move pictures into or out of the slideshow.

Change Eye of Gnome to set the time delay for the slideshow. Added eog-plugins to be able to randomize the slideshow.

gsettings set org.gnome.eog.fullscreen seconds N <N= number of seconds between slides>

sudo apt-get install eog-plugins

Edited crontab -e to start and stop the slideshow on a schedule. vcgencmd is used to start and stop output on the HDMI port starting at 8 AM and stopping at 9 PM. I Used Crontab Guru online tool to help set the times. The vgencmd commands are to turn the display off at 9 PM and turn it back on at 8 AM, then at 8:01 start the slideshow.

0 8 * * * vcgencmd display_power 1 <Turns the screen back on at 8AM>
1 8 * * * /home/pi/scripts/display.sh
0 21 * * * vcgencmd display_power 0 <blanks the screen at 9PM>

Wrote a couple scripts to start the slideshow. Make the scripts executable “chmod 755 <script.sh>” and put all the scripts in a folder named scripts.

display.sh
DISPLAY=:0.0 /home/pi/scripts/runslideshow.sh

runslideshow.sh
eog –slide-show /media/Slides/

Used screen to run testing of the scripts.

screen -ls to list screens

screen -r <screen number> to reattach to a screen

The screensaver would kick on after a while and the temperature would go to 84.9’C or higher sometimes. So I disabled the screensaver completely in the GUI. the problem seems to have gone away with that change.