Category: Raspberry Pi

Categories
Linux Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi + LED Matrix Display project

Intro

A friend bought a bunch of parts and thought we could work on it together. He wanted to reproduce this project: Raspberry Pi Audio Spectrum Display – Hackster.io

So of interest here is that it involved a 64×64 LED matrix display, and a “hat” sold by Adafruit to supposedly make things easier to connect.

Now I am not a hardware guy and never pretended to be. When we realized that it required soldering, I bought those supplies but I didn’t want to be the one to mess things up so he volunteered for that. And yes, it was a mess.

Equipment

See later on in the post for the equipment we used.

The story continues

Who knew that gold on the PCB could be ruined so easily after you’ve changed your mind about a soldered joint and decided to undo what you’ve done? The experience pretty much validated my whole approach to staying away from soldering. So we ruined that hat and had to order another one. While we waited for it I developed a certain strtategy to deal with the shortcomings of the partially destroyed hat. See the section at the bottom entitled Recipe for a broken hat.

Comments on the project

I don’t think the guy did a good job. Details left out where needed, extra stuff added. For instance you don’t need to order that Firebeetle – it’s never used! Also, I’ve been told that his python isn’t very good either. But in general we followed his skimpy instructions. So we ordered the LED matrix from DFRobot, not Adafruit, and I think it’s different. In our case we did indeed follow the project suggestion to wire the 2×8 pin as shown in their (DFRobot’s) picture, leaving out the white wire. Once we soldered the white wire to the hat’s gpio pin 24, we were really in business. What we did not need to do is to solder pin E to either pin 8 or 16. (This is something you apparently need to do for the Adafruit LED.) In our testing it didn’t seem to matter whether or not those connections were made so we left it out on our second hat.

You think he might have mentioned just how much soldering is involed. Let’s see you have 2×20 connector, a 2×8 connector plus a single gpio connection = 57 pins to solder. Yuck.

What we got to work

Deploying images on these LED displays is cool. You just kind of have to see it. It’s hard to describe why. The picture below does not do it justice. Think stadium scoreboard.

In rpi-rgb-led-matrix/utils directory we followed the steps in the README.md file to compile the LED viewer:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libgraphicsmagick++-dev libwebp-dev -y
make led-image-viewer
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#!/bin/sh

# invert images because the sound stuff is otherwise upside-down

sudo led-image-viewer –led-pixel-mapper=”U-mapper;Rotate:180″ –led-gpio-mapping=adafruit-hat –led-cols=64 –led-rows=64 /home/pi/walk-in-the-woods.jpg
Walk in the woods

Do we have flicker? Just a tiny bit. You wouldn’t notice it unless yuo were staring at it for a few seconds, and even then it’s just isolated to a small section of the display. Probably shoddy soldering – we are total amateurs.

Tip for your images

Consider that you only have 64 x 64 pixles to work with. So crop your pictures beforehand to focus on the most interesting aspect – people if there are people in the picture (like we’ve done in the above image), specifically faces if there are faces. Otherwise everything will just look like blurs and blobs. You yourself do not have to resize your pictures down to 64 x 64 – the led software will do the resizing. So just focus on cropping down to a square-sized part of the picture you want to draw attention to.

Real-time audio

So my friend got a USB microphone. I developed the following script to make the python example work with real-time sounds – music playing, conversatiom, whatever. It’s really cool – just the slightest lag. But, yes, the LEDs bounce up in response to louder sounds.

So in the directory rpi-rgb-led-matrix/bindings/python/samples I created the script drjexample.sh.

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#!/bin/sh
# DrJ 6/21
# make the LED react to live sounds by use of a USB microphone
# I am too lazy to look up how to make the python program read from STDIN so I will just
# make the equivalent thing by creating test.wav as a nmed pipe. It's an old linux trick.

rm test.wav; mkfifo test.wav

# background the python program. It will patiently wait for input
sudo python spectrum_matrix.py &

# Now run ffmpeg
# see my own post, https://drjohnstechtalk.com/blog/2019/04/live-stream-to-youtube-from-a-raspberry-pi-webcam/
ffmpeg \
-thread_queue_size 4096 \
-f alsa -i plughw:1,0 \
-ac 2 \
-y \
test.wav

So note that by having inverted the image (180 degree rotation) we have the sounds bars and images both in the same direction so we can switch between the two modes.

I believe to get the python bindings to work we needed to install some additional python libraries, but that part is kind of a blur now. I think what should work is to follow the directions in the README.md file in the directory rpi-rgb-led-matrix/bindings/python, namely

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install python2.7-dev python-pillow -y
make build-python
sudo make install-python

Hopefully that takes care of it. For sure you need numpy.

Future project ideas

How about a board that normally plays a slideshow, but when the ambient sound reaches a certain level – presumably because music is playing – it switches to real-time sound bar mode?? We think it’s doable.

Recipe for a broken hat

For the LED matrix display we got the DFRobot one since that’s what was linked to in the project guide. But the thing is, the reviewer’s write-up is incomplete so what you need to do involves a little guesswork.

At the end of the day all we could salvage while we wait for a new Adafruit hat to come in is the top fourth of the display! The band below it is either blank, or if we push on the cables a certain way, an unreliable duplicate of the top fourth.

The next band suffers from a different problem. Its blue is non-functional. So it’s no good…

And the last band rarely comes on at all.

OK? So we’re down to a 16 x 64 pixel useable area.

But despite all those problems, it’s still kind of cool, I have to admit! I know at work we have these digital sign boards and this reminds me of that. So first thing I did was to create a custom banner – scrolling text.

I call this display program drjexample2.sh. I put it in the directory rpi-rgb-led-matrix/examples-api-use

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#!/bin/sh

# DrJ – 6/21

# nice example

sudo ./demo -D1 –led-rows=64 –led-cols=64 –led-multiplexing=1  –led-brightness=50 -m25 /home/pi/pil_text.ppm

But that requires the existence of a ppm file containing the text I wanted to scroll, since I was working by example. So to create that custom PPM file I created this python script.

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#!/usr/bin/python3

from PIL import Image, ImageDraw, ImageFont


# our fonts

###fnt = ImageFont.truetype(“/usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSans-Bold.ttf”, 14)

fnt = ImageFont.truetype(“/usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSans.ttf”, 16)

fnt36 = ImageFont.truetype(“/usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSans-Bold.ttf”, 36)

fnt2 = ImageFont.truetype(“/usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSans.ttf”, 18)

fntBold = ImageFont.truetype(“/usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSans-Bold.ttf”, 40)


###img = Image.new(‘RGB’, (260, 30), color = (73, 109, 137))

img = Image.new(‘RGB’, (260, 30), color = ‘black’)


d = ImageDraw.Draw(img)

###d.text((0,0), “Baby, welcome to our world!!!”, font=fnt, fill=(255,255,0))

d.text((0,0), “Baby, welcome to our world!!!”, font=fnt, fill=’yellow’)


#img.save(‘pil_text.png’)

img.save(‘pil_text.ppm’, format=’PPM’)

Once I discovered the problem with the bands – by way of running all the demos and experimenting with the arguments a bit – I noticed this directory: rpi-rgb-led-matrix/utils. I perked right up because it held out the promise of displaying jpeg images. Anyone who has seen any of my posts know that I am constantly putting out raspberry pi based photo displays in one form or another. For instance see https://drjohnstechtalk.com/blog/2021/01/raspberry-pi-photo-frame-using-the-pictures-on-your-google-drive-ii/

or

https://drjohnstechtalk.com/blog/2020/12/raspberry-pi-photo-frame-using-your-pictures-on-your-google-drive/

Matrix Display

But see how cool it is? No? It’s a sleeping, recumbent baby. It’s like the further away from it you get, the clearer it becomes. Trust me in person it does look good. And it feels like creating one of those bright LED displays they use in ballparks.

But this same picture also shows the banding problem.

To get the picture displayed I first cropped it to make it wide and short. I wisely chose a picture which was amenable to that approach. I created this display script:

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#!/bin/sh

sudo led-image-viewer –led-no-hardware-pulse –led-gpio-mapping=adafruit-hat –led-cols=64 –led-rows=64 –led-multiplexing=1 /home/pi/baby-sleeping.jpg

But before that can all work, you need to compile the program. Just read through the README.md. It gives these instructions which I followed:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libgraphicsmagick++-dev libwebp-dev -y
make led-image-viewer

It went kind of slowly on my RPi 3, but it worked without incident. When I initially ran the led-image-viewer nothing displayed. So the script above shows the results of my experimentation which seems appropriate for our particular matrix display.

How did we get here?

Just to mention it, we followed the general instructions in that project. So I guess no need to repeat the recipe here.

Slideshow

You know I’m not going to let an opportunity to create a slideshow go to waste. So i created a second appropriately horizontal image which I might effectively show in my narrow available band of 16 x 64 pixels. just to share the little script, it is here:

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#!/bin/sh

cd /home/pi

sudo led-image-viewer –led-no-hardware-pulse –led-gpio-mapping=adafruit-hat –led-cols=64 –led-rows=64 –led-multiplexing=1 -w6 -f baby-and-mom.jpg baby-sleeping.jpg

This infinitely loops over two pictures, displaying each for six seconds.

Start on boot

I have the slideshow start on boot using a simple technique I’ve developed. You edit the crontab file (crontab -e) and enter at the bottom:

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@reboot sleep 35; /home/pi/rpi-rgb-led-matrix/utils/jdrexample2.sh > drjexample.log 2>&1
Lessons learned

My friend ordered all the stuff listed on the DFRobot project page, including their 64×64 LED matrix. Probably a mistake. They basically don’t document it and refer you to Adafruit, where they deal with a 64×64 LED matrix – their own – which may or may not have the same characteristics, leaving you somewhat in limbo. Next time I would order from Adafruit.

As mentioned above that gold foil on printed circuit boards really does come off pretty easily, and then you’re hosed. Because of the lack of technical specs we were never really sure if we needed to solder the E contact to 8 or to 16 and destroyed all those terminals in the process of backing out.

I actually created custom ppm files of solid colors, red, blue, green, white, so that I could prove my suspicions about the third band. Red and green display fine, blue not at all. White displays as yellow.

Viewed close up, the LED matrix doesn’t look like much, and of course I was close up when I was working with it. But when I stepped back I realized how beautiful a brightly illuminated picture of a baby can be! The pixels merge and your mind fills in the spaces between I guess.

The original idea was to tackle sound but I got stuck on the ability to use it as a photo frame (you know me). But he wants to return to sound which I am dreading….

Testing audio

In our first tests. the audio example wasn’t working. But now it seems to be. The project guy’s python code is named spectrum_matrix.py if I recall correctly. It goes into rpi-rgb-led-matrix/bindings/python/samples. And as he says, you run it from that directory as

$ sudo python spectrum_matrix.py

But, his link to test.wav is dead – yet another deficiency in his write-up. At least in my testing not every possible WAV file may work. This one, moo sounds, does however. http://soundbible.com/grab.php?id=1778&type=wav So, it plays for a few seconds – I can hear it through earphones – and the LEDs kind of go up and down. We recorded a wav file and found that that does not work. The error reads like this:

Home directory not accessible: Permission denied
W: [pulseaudio] core-util.c: Failed to open configuration file '/root/.config/pulse//daemon.conf': Permission denied
W: [pulseaudio] daemon-conf.c: Failed to open configuration file: Permission denied
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "spectrum_matrix.py.orig", line 56, in
matrix = calculate_levels(data,chunk,sample_rate)
File "spectrum_matrix.py.orig", line 49, in calculate_levels
power = np.reshape(power,(64,chunk/64))
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/numpy/core/fromnumeric.py", line 292, in reshape
return _wrapfunc(a, 'reshape', newshape, order=order)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/numpy/core/fromnumeric.py", line 56, in _wrapfunc
return getattr(obj, method)(*args, **kwds)
ValueError: cannot reshape array of size 2048 into shape (64,64)

Note that I had renamed the original spectrum_matrix.py to spectrum_matrix.py.orig because we started messing with it. Actually, I pretty much get the same error on the file that works; it’s just that I get it at the end of the LED show, not immediately.

Superficially, the two files differ somewhat in their recording format:

$ file ~/voice.wav moo.wav

/home/pi/voice.wav: RIFF (little-endian) data, WAVE audio, Microsoft PCM, 16 bit, mono 44100 Hz
moo.wav: RIFF (little-endian) data, WAVE audio, Microsoft PCM, 16 bit, stereo 32000 Hz

I played the voice.wav on a Windows PC – it played just fine. Just a little soft.

So what’s the essential difference between the two files? Well, something that jumps out is that the one is mono, the other stereo. Can we somehow test for that? Yes! I made the simplest possible conversion af a mono to a stereo file with the following ffmpeg command:

$ ffmpeg -i ~/voice.wav -ac 2 converted.wav

$ file converted.wav


converted.wav: RIFF (little-endian) data, WAVE audio, Microsoft PCM, 16 bit, stereo 44100 Hz

I copy converted.wav to test.wav and re-run spectrum_matrix.py. This time it works!

Not sure how my friend produced his wave file. But I want to make one on my own. He had plugged a USB microphone into the RPi. I have done research somewhat related to this – publishing a livestream to Youtube, audio only, video grayed out. That’s in this post: https://drjohnstechtalk.com/blog/2019/04/live-stream-to-youtube-from-a-raspberry-pi-webcam/ So I am not afraid to se ffmpeg any longer. So I created this tiny script, record.sh, with my desired arguments:

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#!/bin/sh

# see my own post, https://drjohnstechtalk.com/blog/2019/04/live-stream-to-youtube-from-a-raspberry-pi-webcam/

ffmpeg \

-thread_queue_size 4096 \

-f alsa -i plughw:1,0 \

-ac 2 \

/tmp/ffmpeg.wav

And I ran it while speaking loudly into the mic. It ran OK. The output file comes out as

test.wav: RIFF (little-endian) data, WAVE audio, Microsoft PCM, 16 bit, stereo 48000 Hz

And…it plays with the LEDs dancing. Great.

Audio: LED responds to live input

My friend wants the LED to respond to live input such as his stereo at home. Being a terrible python programmer but at least middling linux techie, I see a way to accomplish it without his having to touch the sample program by employing an old Unix trick: named pipes. So I create this script, drjexample.sh which combines all the knowledge we gained above into one simple script:

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#!/bin/sh
# DrJ 6/21
# make the LED react to live sounds by use of a USB microphone
# I am too lazy to look up how to make the python program read from STDIN so i will just
# make the equivalent thing by creating test.wav as a nmed pipe. It's an old linux trick.

rm test.wav; mkfifo test.wav

# background the python program. It will patiently wait for input
sudo python spectrum_matrix.py &

# Now run ffmpeg
# see my own post, https://drjohnstechtalk.com/blog/2019/04/live-stream-to-youtube-from-a-raspberry-pi-webcam/
ffmpeg \
-thread_queue_size 4096 \
-f alsa -i plughw:1,0 \
-ac 2 \
-y \
test.wav

So a named pipe is just that. Instead of the pipe character we know and love, you coordinate process output from the first process with process input of the second process by way of this special file. The operating system does all the hard work. But it works just as though you had used the | character.

Best of all, this script actually works, to wit, the LED is now responding to live input. I see it jump when I say test into the microphone. Unknown to me is if it will play for extended periods of time – it would be easy for one process to output faster than the other can input for instance, so a backlog builds up. The responsiveness is good, I would guess around no more than 200 ms lag.

Equipment

We used the equipment from this post, except the Firebeetle. You know, that’s just another reason I consider that post to be a sloppy effort. Who lists a piece of equipment that they don’t use?? And again, next time I would rather search for an LED display from Adafruit. We use an RPi 3 and installed the image on a micro SD card with the new-ish Raspberry Pi imager, which works just great: Introducing Raspberry Pi Imager, our new imaging utility – Raspberry Pi

Oh, plus the soldering iron and solder. And a multi-colored ribbon cable with female couplers at one end and a 2×8 connector on the other. Not sure if that came with the LED or not since I didn’t order it.

Our power supply is about 5 amps and plugs into the hat. We do not need power for the RPi.

References and related

This post makes it seem like a walk in the park. Our experience is not so much. Raspberry Pi Audio Spectrum Display – Hackster.io

People seem to like this Raspberry Pi photo frame post I did which draws photos from your Google drive. https://drjohnstechtalk.com/blog/2020/12/raspberry-pi-photo-frame-using-your-pictures-on-your-google-drive/

Introducing Raspberry Pi Imager, our new imaging utility – Raspberry Pi – for putting the operating system formerly known as Raspbian onto a micro SD card.

test.wav (Use this moo wav file and rename to test.wav): http://soundbible.com/grab.php?id=1778&type=wav

Useful ffmpeg commands: 20+ FFmpeg Commands For Beginners – OSTechNix

How I figured out hot to livestream audio to YouTube without video from a RPi using ffmpeg is documented here: https://drjohnstechtalk.com/blog/2019/04/live-stream-to-youtube-from-a-raspberry-pi-webcam/

Github project for this effort (not completely working as of yet):

Categories
Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi photo frame using the pictures on your Google Drive II

Intro

This is basically the same post as my previous post, Raspberry Pi photo frame using your pictures on your Google Drive. The are several ideas I am introducing in this treatment.

  • better time separation of the photos for a more meaningful viewing
  • smart resizing of photos to effectively enlarge narrow photos
  • analysis of photos for date and time
  • analysis of photos for GPS info, converting to city and even address!
  • build up of alternate slideshow which includes date, file, folder and location information embedded at the bottom of every picture
  • quality control check to make sure file is an actual JPEG
  • tiny thumbnail pictures are skipped
  • rotating slideshow refreshes either daily or every three days
  • pictures of documents are excluded (future enhancement)
  • a nice picture is displayed when the slideshow is refreshed

Mostly for my own sake, I’ve re-named most of the relevant files and re-worked some as well in order to avoid name conflicts.

I find this treatment is pretty robust and can withstand a lot of errors and mistakes.

So let’s get started.

The easier way to get the files

Because there are now so many files – 18 at last count! – I’ve bundled them all into a tar file. So to get them all in one fell swoop do this.

$ wget https://drjohnstechtalk.com/blog/downloads/photoFrameII.tar

$ tar xvf photoFrameII.tar

Then skip down to the section of this post called crontab entries, which you will still need to do.

But because I think the scripts could be useful for other projects as well, I’m including them here in their entirety in the following section.

The files

The brains of the thing is master3.sh.

master3.sh

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#!/bin/sh
# DrJ 1/2021
# call this from cron once a day to refesh random slideshow once a day
NUMFOLDERS=20
DEBUG=1
HOME=/home/pi
RANFILE=$HOME/random.list
REANFILE=$HOME/rean.list
DISPLAYFOLDER=$HOME/Pictures
DISPLAYFOLDERTMP=$HOME/Picturestmp
EXIFTMP=$HOME/EXIFtmp
EXIF=$HOME/EXIF
TXTDIR=$HOME/picstxt
MSHOW=$HOME/mediashow
MSHOW2=$HOME/mediashowtmp2
MSHOW3=$HOME/mediashowtmp3
SLEEPINTERVAL=1
STARTFOLDER="MaryDocs/Pictures and videos"

echo "Starting master process at "`date`


cd $HOME

rm -rf $DISPLAYFOLDERTMP
mkdir $DISPLAYFOLDERTMP

#listing of all Google drive files starting from the picture root
# this takes a few minutes so we may want to skip for debugging
if [ "$1" = "skip" ]; then
  if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo SKIP Listing all files from Google drive; fi
else
  if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo Listing all files from Google drive; fi
  rclone ls remote:"$STARTFOLDER" > files
# filter down to only jpegs, lose the docs folders and the tiny JPEGs
  if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo Picking out the JPEGs and losing the small images; fi
  egrep '\.[jJ][pP][eE]?[gG]$' files |awk '$1 > 11000 {$1=""; print substr($0,2)}'|grep -i -v /docs/ > jpegs.list
fi

# check if we got anything. If our Internt dropped there may have been a problem, for instance
flines=`cat files|wc -l`
if [ $flines -lt 60 ]; then
  echo "rclone did not produce enough files. Check your Internet setup and rclone configuration."
  echo Only $flines files in the file listing - not enough - so pausing 60 seconds and starting over... at `date`
# start a new job and kill ourselves!
  nohup $HOME/master3.sh > master.log 2>&1 &
  exit
fi

# throw NUMFOLDERS or so random numbers for picture selection, select triplets of photos by putting
# names into a file
if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo "\nGenerate random filename triplets"; fi
./random-files3.pl -f $NUMFOLDERS -j jpegs.list -r $RANFILE

# copy over these 60 jpegs
if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo "\nCopy over these random files"; fi
cat $RANFILE|while read line; do
  if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo filepath is $line; fi
  rclone copy remote:"${STARTFOLDER}/$line" $DISPLAYFOLDERTMP
  sleep $SLEEPINTERVAL
done

# do a re-analysis to push pictures further apart in time
if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo "\nRe-analyzing pictures for their timestamps"; fi
cd $DISPLAYFOLDERTMP; $HOME/reanalyze.pl

# copy over just the new pictures that we determined were needed
if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo "\nCopy over the needed replacement files"; fi
cat $REANFILE|while read line; do
  if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo filepath is $line; fi
  rclone copy remote:"${STARTFOLDER}/$line" $DISPLAYFOLDERTMP
  sleep $SLEEPINTERVAL
done

# QC: toss out the pics which are not actually JPEGs
if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo "\nQC: Toss out the pics which are not actually JPEGs"; fi
cd $DISPLAYFOLDERTMP; ../QC.pl

# save EXIF metadata for later
if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo "\nSave EXIF metadata for later"; fi
cd $DISPLAYFOLDERTMP; $HOME/get-all-EXIF.sh
rm -rf $EXIF;mv $EXIFTMP $EXIF

# analyze EXIF info to extract most interesting things
if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo "\nAnalyze EXIF data"; fi
rm -rf $TXTDIR; $HOME/analyze.sh

# rotate pics as needed
if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo "\nRotate the pics which need it"; fi
cd $DISPLAYFOLDERTMP; $HOME/rotate-as-needed.sh

# resize pics
if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo "\nSize all pics to the display size"; fi
$HOME/resize.sh

# create text info + images
if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo "\nEmbed pic info"; fi
$HOME/embedpicinfo.sh

cd ~

# kill any old slideshow
if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo Killing old fbi slideshow; fi
sudo pkill -9 -f fbi
pkill -9 -f m3.pl

# remove old pics
if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo Removing old pictures; fi
rm -rf $DISPLAYFOLDER

mv $DISPLAYFOLDERTMP $DISPLAYFOLDER
cp $MSHOW3 $MSHOW

touch refresh

#run looping fbi slideshow on these pictures
if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo Start "\nfbi slideshow in background"; fi
cd $DISPLAYFOLDER ; nohup ~/m3.pl  >> ~/m3.log 2>&1 &

if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo "And now it is "`date`; fi

random-files3.pl

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#!/usr/bin/perl
use Getopt::Std;
my %opt=();
getopts("c:df:j:r:",\%opt);
$nofolders = $opt{f} ? $opt{f} : 20;
$DEBUG = $opt{d} ? 1 : 0;
$cutoff = $opt{c} ? $opt{c} : 5;
$cutoffS = 60*$cutoff;
$jpegs = $opt{j} ? $opt{j} : "jpegs.list";
$ranpicfile = $opt{r} ? $opt{r} : "jpegs-random.list";
print "d,f,j,r: $opt{d}, $opt{f}, $opt{j}, $opt{r}\n" if $DEBUG;
$mshowt = "mediashowtmp";
open(JPEGS,$jpegs) || die "Cannot open jpegs listing file $jpegs!!\n";
@jpegs = <JPEGS>;
# remove newline character
$nopics = chomp @jpegs;
open(RAN,"> $ranpicfile") || die "Cannot open random picture file $ranpicfile!!\n";
for($i=0;$i<$nofolders;$i++) {
  $t = int(rand($nopics-2));
  print "random number is: $t\n" if $DEBUG;
# a lot of our pics follow this naming convention
# 20160831_090658.jpg
  ($date,$time) = $jpegs[$t] =~ /(\d{8})_(\d{6})/;
  if ($date) {
    print "date, time: $date $time\n" if $DEBUG;
# ensure neighboring picture is at least five minutes different in time
    $iPO = $iP = $diff = 1;
    ($hr,$min,$sec) = $time =~ /(\d\d)(\d\d)(\d\d)/;
    $secs = 3600*$hr + 60*$min + $sec;
    print "Pre-pic logic\n";
    while ($diff < $cutoffS) {
      $iP++;
      $priorPic = $jpegs[$t-$iP];
      $Pdate = $Ptime = 0;
      ($Pdate,$Ptime) = $priorPic =~ /(\d{8})_(\d{6})/;
      ($Phr,$Pmin,$Psec) = $Ptime =~ /(\d\d)(\d\d)(\d\d)/;
      $Psecs = 3600*$Phr + 60*$Pmin + $Psec;
      print "hr,min,sec,Phr,Pmin,Psec: $hr,$min,$sec,$Phr,$Pmin,$Psec\n" if $DEBUG;
      $diff = abs($secs - $Psecs);
      print "diff: $diff\n" if $DEBUG;
# end our search if we happened upon different dates
      $diff = 99999 if $Pdate ne $date;
    }
# post-picture logic - same as pre-picture
    print "Post-pic logic\n";
    $diff = 0;
    while ($diff < $cutoffS) {
      $iPO++;
      $postPic = $jpegs[$t+$iPO];
      $Pdate = $Ptime = 0;
      ($Pdate,$Ptime) = $postPic =~ /(\d{8})_(\d{6})/;
      ($Phr,$Pmin,$Psec) = $Ptime =~ /(\d\d)(\d\d)(\d\d)/;
      $Psecs = 3600*$Phr + 60*$Pmin + $Psec;
      print "hr,min,sec,Phr,Pmin,Psec: $hr,$min,$sec,$Phr,$Pmin,$Psec\n" if $DEBUG;
      $diff = abs($Psecs - $secs);
      print "diff: $diff\n" if $DEBUG;
# end our search if we happened upon different dates
      $diff = 99999 if $Pdate ne $date;
    }
  } else {
    $iP = $iPO = 2;
  }
  $priorPic = $jpegs[$t-$iP];
  $Pic = $jpegs[$t];
  $postPic = $jpegs[$t+$iPO];
  print RAN qq($priorPic
$Pic
$postPic
);
# this is how we'll preserve the order of the pictures. ls -1 often gives a different order!!
($p1) = $priorPic =~ /([^\/]+)$/;
($p2) = $Pic =~ /([^\/]+)$/;
($p3) = $postPic =~ /([^\/]+)$/;
print "p1 p2 p3: $p1 $p2 $p3" if $DEBUG;
$picsinorder .= $p1 . "\0" . $p2 . "\0" . $p3 . "\0";
}
close(RAN);
open(MS,">$mshowt") || die "Cannot open mediashow file $mshowt!!\n";
print MS $picsinorder;
close(MS);
print "pics in order: $picsinorder\n" if $DEBUG;

reanalyze.pl

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#!/usr/bin/perl
use Getopt::Std;
my %opt=();
#
# assumption is that we are runnin this from a directory containing pictures
$tier1 = 100; $tier2 = 200; $tier3 = 300; # secs
$DEBUG = 1;
$HOME = "/home/pi";
# pics are here
$pNames = "$HOME/reanpicnames";
$ranfile = "$HOME/random.list";
$reanfile = "$HOME/rean.list";
$origfile = "$HOME/jpegs.list";
$mshowt = "$HOME/mediashowtmp";
$mshow2 = "$HOME/mediashowtmp2";

open(REAN,">$reanfile") || die "Cannot open reanalyze file $reanfile!!\n";
$ms = `cat $mshowt`;
print "Original media show: $ms\n" if $DEBUG;
@lines = split('\0',$ms);
$Pdate = $Phr = $Pmin = $Psec = 0;
$diff = 9999;
for($i=0;$i<@lines;$i++){
  $date = 0;
  $secs = $ymd = 0;
  $_ = $lines[$i];
  $file = $_;
# ignore pictures with names like 20130820_180050.jpg
  next if /\d{8}_\d{4}/;
  open(ANAL,"$HOME/getinfo.py \"$file\"|") || die "Cannot open file: $file!!\n";
  print "filename: $file\n" if $DEBUG;
  while(<ANAL>){
#extract date and time from remaining pictures, if possible
# # DateTimeOriginal = 2018:08:18 20:16:47
#    print STDERR "DATE: $_" if $DEBUG;
if (/date/i && $date++ < 1) {
   print "date match in getinfo.pyoutput: $_" if $DEBUG;
   ($ymd,$hr,$min,$sec) = /(\d{4}:\d\d:\d\d) (\d\d):(\d\d):(\d\d)/;
   $secs = 3600*$hr + 60*$min + $sec;
   print "file,secs,ymd,i: $file,$secs,$ymd,$i\n" if $DEBUG;
   $YMD[$i] = $ymd;
   $SECS[$i] = $secs;
}
} # end loop over analysis of this pic
} # end loop over all files
# now go over that
$oldfolder = 0;
for($i=1;$i<@lines;$i++){
 $folder = int($i/3) + 1;
 next unless $folder != $oldfolder;
   print "analyzing results. folder no. $folder\n" if $DEBUG;
# analyze pics in triplets
# center pic
   $j = ($folder - 1)*3 + 1;
   for ($o=-1;$o<2;$o+=2){
     $k=$j+$o;
     print "j,k,o: $j,$k,$o\n" if $DEBUG;
     next unless $SECS[$j] > 0 && $YMD[$j] == $YMD[$k] && $YMD[$j] > 0;
     print "We have non-0 dates we're dealing with\n" if $DEBUG;
     $file = $lines[$k];
     chomp($file);
     $diff = abs($SECS[$j] - $SECS[$k]);
     print "diff: $diff\n" if $DEBUG;
     next unless $diff < $tier3;
# the closer the files are together the more we push away
     $bump = 1 if $diff < $tier3;
     $bump = 2 if $diff < $tier2;
     $bump = 3 if $diff < $tier1;
# get full filepath
     $filepath = `grep \"$file\" $ranfile`;
     chomp($filepath);
# now use that to search within the jpegs file listing
     $prog = $o < 0 ? "head" : "tail";
     $newfilepath = `grep -C$bump "$filepath" $origfile|$prog -1`;
     ($newfile) = $newfilepath =~ /([^\/]+)$/;
     chomp($newfile);
     print "file,filepath,newfile,newfilepath,bump: $file,$filepath,$newfile,$newfilepath,$bump\n" if $DEBUG;
     print REAN $newfilepath;
# we'll get the new pictures over in a separate step to keep this more atomic
     $ms =~ s/$file/$newfile/;
    }
    $oldfolder = $folder;
} # end loop over pics
# print out new mediashow pics in order
print "Printing new mediashow: $ms\n" if $DEBUG;
open(MS,">$mshow2") || die "Cannot open mediashow $mshow2!!\n";
print MS $ms;
close(MS)

QC.pl

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#!/usr/bin/perl
# kick out the non-JPEG files - sometimes they creep in
$DEBUG = 1;
$HOME = "/home/pi";
$mshow2 = "$HOME/mediashowtmp2";
$mshow3 = "$HOME/mediashowtmp3";
$ms = `cat $mshow2`;
@pics = split('\0',$ms);
foreach $file (@pics) {
  print "file is $file\n" if $DEBUG;
#DSC00185.JPG: JPEG image data, JFIF standard 1.01...
  $res = `file "$file"|cut -d: -f2`;
  if ($res =~ /JPEG/i){
    print "This file is indeed a JPEG image\n" if $DEBUG;
  } else {
    print "Not a JPEG image! We have to remove this file form the mediashow\n" if $DEBUG;
    $ms =~ s/$file\0//;
  }
}
# print out new mediashow pics in order
print "Printing new mediashow: $ms\n" if $DEBUG;
open(MS,">$mshow3") || die "Cannot open mediashow $mshow3!!\n";
print MS $ms;
close(MS);

get-all-EXIF.sh

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#!/bin/sh
# DrJ 1/2021
# preserve EXIF info of all the images because our rotate step removes it
# and we will use it in subsequent steps
# assumption is that our current directory is the one where we want to read files
EXIFTMP=~/EXIFtmp
mkdir $EXIFTMP
ls -1|while read line; do
  echo file is "$line"
  ~/getinfo.py "$line" > $EXIFTMP/"$line"
done

analyze.sh

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#!/bin/sh
# DrJ 1/2021
# try to extract date, file and folder name and even GPS info, create jpegs with info
# for each image
# assumption is that are current directory is the one where we want to alter files
HOME=/home/pi
TXTDIR=$HOME/picstxt
# it's assumed EXIF info for each pic has already been extracted and put into EXIF diretory
EXIF=$HOME/EXIF
mkdir $TXTDIR
cd $EXIF
ls -1|while read line; do
  echo file is "$line"
  echo -n "$line"|../analyzeDate.pl > "$TXTDIR/${line}"
  echo -n "$line"|../analyzeGPS.pl >> "$TXTDIR/${line}"
done

rotate-as-needed.sh

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#!/bin/sh
# DrJ 12/2020
# some of our downloaded files will be sideways, and fbi doesn't auto-rotate them as far as I know
# assumption is that our current directory is the one where we want to alter files
ls -1|while read line; do
  echo file is "$line"
  o=`~/getinfo.py "$line"|grep -ai orientation|awk '{print $NF}'`
  echo orientation is $o
  if [ "$o" -eq "6" ]; then
    echo "90 clockwise is needed, o is $o"
# rotate and move it
    ~/rotate.py -90 "$line"
    mv rot_"$line" "$line"
  elif [ "$o" -eq "8" ]; then
    echo "90 counterclock is needed, o is $o"
# rotate and move it
    ~/rotate.py 90 "$line"
    mv rot_"$line" "$line"
  elif [ "$o" -eq "3" ]; then
    echo "180 rot is needed, o is $o"
# rotate and move it
    ~/rotate.py 180 "$line"
    mv rot_"$line" "$line"
  fi
done

resize.sh

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#!/bin/sh
# DrJ 2/2021
# To combat the RPi's inherent sluggish performance we'll downsize the pictures in advance to save fbi the effort
#
# on the pidisplay fbset gives:
#mode "800x480"
#    geometry 800 480 800 480 32
#    timings 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
#    rgba 8/16,8/8,8/0,8/24
#endmode
displaywidth=`fbset|grep geometry|awk '{print $2}'`
displayheight=`fbset|grep geometry|awk '{print $3}'`

ls -1|while read line; do
  echo file is "$line"
  ~/fancyresize.py $displaywidth $displayheight "$line"
  mv resize_"$line" "$line"
done

embedpicinfo.sh

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#!/bin/sh
# DrJ 2/2021
# To combat the RPi's inherent sluggish performance we'll downsize the pictures in advance to save fbi the effort
#
# on the pidisplay fbset gives:
#mode "800x480"
#    geometry 800 480 800 480 32
#    timings 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
#    rgba 8/16,8/8,8/0,8/24
#endmode
displaywidth=`fbset|grep geometry|awk '{print $2}'`
displayheight=`fbset|grep geometry|awk '{print $3}'`

ls -1|while read line; do
  echo file is "$line"
# this will create a new image with same name prepended with txt_
  ~/embedpicinfo.py $displaywidth $displayheight "$line"
done
Auxiliary files

rotate.py

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#!/usr/bin/python3
# call with two arguments: degrees-to-rotate and filename
import PIL, os
import sys
from PIL import Image
# first do: pip3 install piexif
import piexif

degrees = int(sys.argv[1])
pic = sys.argv[2]

picture= Image.open(pic)
# see https://github.com/hMatoba/Piexif for piexif writeup
# this method of preserving EXIF info does not always work, and
# causes script to crash when it fails!
##exif_dict = piexif.load(picture.info["exif"])
##exif_bytes = piexif.dump(exif_dict)
## both rotate and preserve EXIF data
##picture.rotate(degrees,expand=True).save("rot_" + pic,"jpeg", exif=exif_bytes)
# rotate (which will blow away EXIF info, sorry...)
picture.rotate(degrees,expand=True).save("rot_" + pic,"jpeg")

getinfo.py

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#!/usr/bin/python3
import os,sys
from PIL import Image
from PIL.ExifTags import TAGS

for (tag,value) in Image.open(sys.argv[1])._getexif().items():
        print ('%s = %s' % (TAGS.get(tag), value))

print ('%s = %s' % (TAGS.get(tag), value))

embedpicinfo.py

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#!/usr/bin/python3
# from https://auth0.com/blog/image-processing-in-python-with-pillow/
# fonts are described here:
# https://pillow.readthedocs.io/en/stable/reference/ImageDraw.html
from PIL import Image, ImageDraw, ImageFont
import sys, os

width = int(sys.argv[1])
height = int(sys.argv[2])
# for Pidisplay:
#width = 800
#height = 480
imageFile = sys.argv[3]
imageandtext = 'txt_' + imageFile

tfile = '../picstxt/' + imageFile
f = open(tfile)
txtlines = f.readlines()
f.close()

# our fonts
fnt = ImageFont.truetype("/usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSans-Bold.ttf", 14)
#fnt = ImageFont.truetype("/usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSans.ttf", 40)
fnt36 = ImageFont.truetype("/usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSans-Bold.ttf", 36)
fnt2 = ImageFont.truetype("/usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSans.ttf", 18)
fntBold = ImageFont.truetype("/usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSans-Bold.ttf", 40)
# PiDisplay resolution is 800x480
margin = 35
# semi-parameterized variables
x0 = margin - 30
x1 = margin -15
cwidth = 6
yline = 27
ychevron=(yline-28)/2
ycoff = 5
yoffset = 12
yrec= -10
rpad = 15
#
textimagey = 130
textimagex = width

# menu items
textimage = Image.new('RGB', (textimagex, textimagey), 'white')
for t in txtlines:
    img_draw = ImageDraw.Draw(textimage)
    img_draw.text((margin, yoffset), t, font=fnt, fill='MidnightBlue')
    yoffset += yline

# merge three images together...
# black background covering whole display:
masterimage = Image.new('RGB',(width,height),'black')
# original image:
oimage = Image.open(imageFile)
# original image width
owidth = oimage.size[0]
# get offset so narrow pictures are centered
xoffset = int((width - owidth)/2)
masterimage.paste(oimage,(xoffset,0))
masterimage.paste(textimage,(0,height - textimagey))

masterimage.save(imageandtext)

fancyresize.py

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#!/usr/bin/python3
# DrJ 2/2021
import PIL, os
import sys
from PIL import Image
# somewhat inspired by http://www.riisen.dk/dop/pil.html
# arguments:
# <width> <height> file
# with and height should be provided as values in pixels
# image file should be provided as argument.
# A pidisplay is 800x480

displaywidth = int(sys.argv[1])
displayheight = int(sys.argv[2])
smallscreen = 801
imageFile = sys.argv[3]
im1 = Image.open(imageFile)
narrowmax = .76
blowupfactor = 1.1
# take less from the top than the bottom
topshare = .3
bottomshare = 1.0 - topshare
# for DrJ debugging
DEBUG = True
if DEBUG:
  print("display width and height: ",displaywidth,displayheight)

def imgResize(im):
    width = im.size[0]
    height = im.size[1]
    if DEBUG:
      print("image width and height: ",width,height)

# If the aspect ratio is wider than the display screen's aspect ratio,
# constrain the width to the display's full width
    if width/float(height) > float(displaywidth)/float(displayheight):
      if DEBUG:
        print("In section width contrained to full width code section")

      widthn = displaywidth
      heightn = int(height*float(displaywidth)/width)
      im5 = im.resize((widthn, heightn), Image.ANTIALIAS) # best down-sizing filter
    else:
      heightn = displayheight
      widthn  = int(width*float(displayheight)/height)

      if width/float(height) < narrowmax and displaywidth < smallscreen:
# if width is narrow we're losing too much by using the whole picture.
# Blow it up by blowupfactor% if display is small, and crop most of it from the bottom
        heightn = int(displayheight*blowupfactor)
        widthn  = int(width*float(heightn)/height)
        im4 = im.resize((widthn, heightn), Image.ANTIALIAS) # best down-sizing filter
        top = int(displayheight*(blowupfactor - 1)*topshare)
        bottom = int(heightn - displayheight*(blowupfactor - 1)*bottomshare)
        if DEBUG:
          print("heightn,top,widthn,bottom: ",heightn,top,widthn,bottom)

        im5 = im4.crop((0,top,widthn,bottom))
      else:
        im5 = im.resize((widthn, heightn), Image.ANTIALIAS) # best down-sizing filter

    im5.save("resize_" + imageFile)

imgResize(im1)

analyzeDate.pl

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#!/usr/bin/perl
# 20180818_201647.jpg
use POSIX;
$DEBUG = 1;
$HOME = "/home/pi";
$random = "$HOME/random.list";
$rean   = "$HOME/rean.list";
#$file = "Picturestmp/20180422_134220.jpg";
while(<>){
$GPS = $date = 0;
$gpsinfo = "";
$file = $_;
#open(ANAL,"$HOME/getinfo.py \"$file\"|") || die "Cannot open file: $file!!\n";
open(ANAL,"cat \"$file\"|") || die "Cannot open file: $file!!\n";
print STDERR "filename: $file\n" if $DEBUG;
while(<ANAL>){
  $town = "";
  if (/DateTimeOriginal/i && $date++ < 1) {
# DateTimeOriginal = 2018:08:18 20:16:47
#or...  DateTimeDigitized = 2016/03/07 00:57:49
    print STDERR "DATE: $_" if $DEBUG;
    ($yr,$mon,$date,$hr,$min) = /(\d{4}):(\d\d):(\d\d) (\d\d):(\d\d)/;
    print STDERR "$yr,$mon,$date,$hr,$min\n" if $DEBUG;
# my custom format: Saturday, August 18, 2018  8:16 pm
    $dateinfo =  strftime("%A, %B %d, %Y %l:%M %p", 0, $min, $hr, $date , $mon - 1, $yr - 1900, -1, -1, -1);
  }
}
# folder info from random.list
$match = `cat $random $rean|grep "$file"`;
($folder) = $match =~ /(.+)\/[^\/]+/;
print STDERR "matched line, folder: $match, $folder\n" if $DEBUG;

# if no date, use filesystem date
if ( ! $dateinfo ) {
  $jpegfile = "../Picturestmp/$file";
  $mtime = (stat($jpegfile))[9];
  $handtst = `ls -l "$jpegfile"`;
  @ltime = localtime $mtime;
  $dateinfo =  strftime("(guess) %A, %B %d, %Y %l:%M %p",@ltime);
  print STDERR "No date info. Use filesystem date. mtime is $mtime. dateinfo: $dateinfo\n";
  print STDERR "Hand test of file age: $handtst\n";
}

$dateinfo = $dateinfo || "No date found";
$gpsinfo = $gpsinfo || "No info found";

print qq(File: $file
Folder: $folder
Date: $dateinfo
);
}

analyzeGPS.pl

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#!/usr/bin/perl
# use in combination with this post https://drjohnstechtalk.com/blog/2020/12/convert-gps-coordinates-into-town-name/
use POSIX;
$DEBUG = 1;
$HOME = "/home/pi";
#$file = "Pictures/20180422_134220.jpg";
while(<>){
$GPS = $date = 0;
$gpsinfo = "";
$file = $_;
#open(ANAL,"$HOME/getinfo.py \"$file\"|") || die "Cannot open file: $file!!\n";
open(ANAL,"cat \"$file\"|") || die "Cannot open file: $file!!\n";
print STDERR "filename: $file\n" if $DEBUG;
while(<ANAL>){
  $postalcode = $town = $name = "";
  if (/GPS/i) {
    print STDERR "GPS: $_" if $DEBUG;
# GPSInfo = {1: 'N', 2: (39.0, 21.0, 22.5226), 3: 'W', 4: (74.0, 25.0, 40.0267), 5: 1.7, 6: 0.0, 7: (23.0, 4.0, 14.0), 29: '2016:07:22'}
   ($pole,$deg,$min,$sec,$hemi,$lngdeg,$lngmin,$lngsec) = /1: '([NS])', 2: \(([\d\.]+), ([\d\.]+), ([\d\.]+)...3: '([EW])', 4: \(([\d\.]+), ([\d\.]+), ([\d\.]+)\)/i;
   print STDERR "$pole,$deg,$min,$sec,$hemi,$lngdeg,$lngmin,$lngsec\n" if $DEBUG;
   $lat = $deg + $min/60.0 + $sec/3600.0;
   $lat = -$lat if $pole eq "S";
   $lng = $lngdeg + $lngmin/60.0 + $lngsec/3600.0;
   $lng = -$lng if $hemi = "W" || $hemi eq "w";
   print STDERR "lat,lng: $lat, $lng\n" if $DEBUG;
   #$placename = `curl -s "$url"|grep -i toponym`;
   next if $lat == 0 && $lng == 0;
# the address API is the most precise
   $url = "http://api.geonames.org/address?lat=$lat\&lng=$lng\&username=drjohns";
   print STDERR "Url: $url\n" if $DEBUG;
   $results = `curl -s "$url"|egrep -i 'street|house|locality|postal|adminName'`;
   print STDERR "results: $results\n" if $DEBUG;
   ($street) = $results =~ /street>(.+)</;
   ($houseNumber) = $results =~ /houseNumber>(.+)</;
   ($postalcode) = $results =~ /postalcode>(.+)</;
   ($state) = $results =~ /adminName1>(.+)</;
   ($town) = $results =~ /locality>(.+)</;
   print STDERR "street, houseNumber, postalcode, state, town: $street, $houseNumber, $postalcode, $state, $town\n" if $DEBUG;
# I think locality is pretty good name. If it exists, don't go  further
   $postalcode = "" if $town;
   if (!$postalcode && !$town){
# we are here if we didn't get interesting results from address reverse loookup, which often happens.
     $url = "http://api.geonames.org/extendedFindNearby?lat=$lat\&lng=$lng\&username=drjohns";
     print STDERR "Address didn't work out. Trying extendedFindNearby instead. Url: $url\n" if $DEBUG;
     $results = `curl -s "$url"`;
# parse results - there may be several objects returned
     $topelemnt = $results =~ /<geoname>/i ? "geoname" : "geonames";
     @elmnts = ("street","streetnumber","lat","lng","locality","postalcode","countrycode","countryname","name","adminName2","adminName1");
     $cnt = xml1levelparse($results,$topelemnt,@elmnts);

     @lati = @{ $xmlhash{lat}};
     @long = @{ $xmlhash{lng}};
# find the closest entry
     $distmax = 1E7;
     for($i=0;$i<$cnt;$i++){
       $dist = ($lat - $lati[$i])**2 + ($lng - $long[$i])**2;
       print STDERR "dist,lati,long: $dist, $lati[$i], $long[$i]\n" if $DEBUG;
       if ($dist < $distmax) {
         print STDERR "dist < distmax condition. i is: $i\n";
         $isave = $i;
       }
     }
     $street = @{ $xmlhash{street}}[$isave];
     $houseNumber = @{ $xmlhash{streetnumber}}[$isave];
     $admn2 = @{ $xmlhash{adminName2}}[$isave];
     $postalcode = @{ $xmlhash{postalcode}}[$isave];
     $name = @{ $xmlhash{name}}[$isave];
     $countrycode = @{ $xmlhash{countrycode}}[$isave];
     $countryname = @{ $xmlhash{countryname}}[$isave];
     $state = @{ $xmlhash{adminName1}}[$isave];
     print STDERR "street, houseNumber, postalcode, state, admn2, name: $street, $houseNumber, $postalcode, $state, $admn2, $name\n" if $DEBUG;
     if ($countrycode ne "US"){
       $state .= " $countryname";
     }
     $state .= " (approximate)";
   }
# turn zipcode into town name with this call
   if ($postalcode) {
     print STDERR "postalcode $postalcode exists, let's convert to a town name\n";
     print STDERR "url: $url\n";
     $url = "http://api.geonames.org/postalCodeSearch?country=US\&postalcode=$postalcode\&username=drjohns";
     $results = `curl -s "$url"|egrep -i 'name|locality|adminName'`;
     ($town) = $results =~ /<name>(.+)</i;
     print STDERR "results,town: $results,$town\n";
   }
   if (!$town) {
# no town name, use adminname2 which is who knows what in general
     print STDERR "Stil no town name. Use adminName2 as next best thing\n";
     $town = $admn2;
   }
   if (!$town) {
# we could be in the ocean! I saw that once, and name was North Atlantic Ocean
     print STDERR "Still no town. Try to use name: $name as last resort\n";
     $town = $name;
   }
   $gpsinfo = "$houseNumber $street $town, $state" if $locality || $town;
   } # end of GPS info exists condition
  } # end loop over ANAL file
  $gpsinfo = $gpsinfo || "No info found";
  print qq(Location: $gpsinfo
);
} # end loop over STDIN

#####################
# function to parse some xml and fill a hash of arrays
sub xml1levelparse{
# build an array of hashes
$string = shift;
# strip out newline chars
$string =~ s/\n//g;
$parentelement = shift;
@elements = @_;
$i=0;
while($string =~ /<$parentelement>/i){
 $i++;
 ($childelements) = $string =~ /<$parentelement>(.+?)<\/$parentelement>/i;
 print STDERR "childelements: $childelements" if $DEBUG;
 $string =~ s/<$parentelement>(.+?)<\/$parentelement>//i;
 print STDERR "string: $string\n" if $DEBUG;
 foreach $element (@elements){
  print STDERR "element: $element\n" if $DEBUG;
  ($value) = $childelements =~ /<$element>([^<]+)<\/$element>/i;
  print STDERR "value: $value\n" if $DEBUG;
  push @{ $xmlhash{$element} }, $value;
 }
} # end of loop over parent elements
return $i;
} # end sub xml1levelparse

m3.pl

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#!/usr/bin/perl
# show the pics ; rotate the screen as needed
# for now, assume the display is in a neutral
# orientation at the start
use Time::HiRes qw(usleep);
$DEBUG = 1;
$delay = 6; # seconds between pics
###$delay = 4; # for testing
$mdelay = 200; # milliseconds
$mshow = "$ENV{HOME}/mediashow";
$pNames = "$ENV{HOME}/pNames";
# pics are here
$picsDir = "$ENV{HOME}/Pictures";
$refreshFile = "$ENV{HOME}/refresh";

chdir($picsDir);
$cn = `ls -1|wc -l`;
chomp($cn);
print "$cn files\n" if $DEBUG;
# throw up a first picture - all black. Trick to make black bckgrd permanent
system("sudo fbi -a --noverbose -T 1 $ENV{HOME}/black.jpg");
# see if this is a new batch of pictures
$refresh = (stat($refreshFile))[9];
$now = time();
$diff = $now - $refresh;
print "refresh,now,diff: $refresh, $now, $diff\n" if $DEBUG;
if ($diff < 100){
  system("sudo fbi -a --noverbose -T 1 $ENV{HOME}/newslideshowintro.jpg");
  sleep(25);
}
system("sudo fbi -a --noverbose -T 1 $ENV{HOME}/black.jpg");
system("sleep 1; sudo killall fbi");
# start infinitely looping fbi slideshow
for (;;) {
# then start slide show
# shell echo cannot work with null character so we need to use a file to store it
    system("sudo xargs -a $mshow -0 fbi --noverbose -1 -T 1  -t $delay ");
    ###system("sudo xargs -a $mshow -0 fbi -a -1 -T 1  -t $delay "); # for testing
# fbi runs in background, then exits, so we need to monitor if it's still alive
    for(;;) {
      open(MON,"ps -ef|grep fbi|grep -v grep|") || die "Cannot launch ps -ef!!\n";
      $match = <MON>;
      if ($match) {
        print "got fbi match\n" if $DEBUG > 1;
        } else {
        print "no fbi match\n" if $DEBUG;
# fbi not found
          last;
      }
      close(MON);
      print "usleeping, noexist is $noexit\n" if $DEBUG > 1;
      usleep($mdelay);
    } # end loop testing if fbi has exited
} # close of infinite loop
Optional script

mshowtmp.pl (revision not yet reflected in the tar file)

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#!/usr/bin/perl
# add txt_ to beginning of filename
$DEBUG = 1;
$HOME = "/home/pi";
$mshow = "$HOME/mediashow.orig";
$mshow2 = "$HOME/mediashowtmp2";
$ms = `cat $mshow`;
@pics = split('\0',$ms);
$ms = "";
foreach $file (@pics) {
  print "file is $file\n" if $DEBUG;
  $ms .= "txt_" . $file . "\0";
}
# print out new mediashow pics in order
print "Printing new mediashow: $ms\n" if $DEBUG;
open(MS,">$mshow2") || die "Cannot open mediashow $mshow2!!\n";
print MS $ms;
close(MS);

crontab entries

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@reboot sleep 20; ./m3.pl >> m3.log 2>&1

26 5 */3 * * ./master3.sh >> master.log 2>&1

That will refresh the slideshow every three days, which we found is a good interval for our lifestyle – some days you don’t get around to viewing them. If you want to refresh every day just change ‘*/3″ to ‘*’.

And… that’s it!

Reminder

Don’t forget to make all these files executable. Something like:

$ chmod +x *.pl *.py *.sh

should do it.

My equipment

RPi 3 running Raspbian Lite

Pi Display (probably would also work with an HDMI display)/ The Pi Display resolution is 800×480, so pretty small.

Pre-install

There are a few things you’ll need such as fbi, python3, pip, python Pillow and rclone. That’s basically described in my previous post so I won’t repeat it here.

Getting started

To see how badly things are going for you (hey, I like to be cautiously pessimistic) after you’ve created all these files and have installed rclone, do a

$ ./master3.sh

If you have your rclone file listing (which takes a long time) and want to focusing on debugging the rest of it, do a

$ ./master3.sh skip

Discussion

In this version of Raspberry Pi photo frame I’ve made more effort to force time separation between the randomly selected photos. But, that’s not all. I blow up pictures taken in a narrow (portrait) mode (see next paragraph). And I do some fancy analysis to determine filename, folder, date, time and even location of the pictures. And there’s more. I create an alternate version of each photo which embeds this info at the bottom – in anticipation of my even more fancy remote-controlled slideshow! I am afraid to overwrite what I have previously posted because that by itself is a complete solution and works quite well on its own. So this can be considered worthy of folks looking for a little more challenge to get better results.

The fancyresize.py script is designed around my small PiDisplay which has a horizontal resolution of only 800 pixels. It blows up a narrow, portrait-format picture only if the detected display has a horizontal resolution of no more than 800 pixels. It blows the picture up by 10%, chops off 3% from the top, 7% from the bottom, because that yields optimal results in my experience. If you like that approach but are using a larger HDMI display, you could edit the “801” in that file to make it a larger number (bigger than your display, like 5000).

Show pictures with embedded info

This process is not streamlined. But it can be cool to do it by hand. You could follow these steps.

$ ./mshowtmp.pl; mv mediashowtmp2 mediashow

If you wait the whole cycle the next time around it should display the pictures with the embedded info at the bottom. If you’re impatient, do this:

$ sudo pkill -9 fbi; sudo pkill -9 m3.pl

$ nohup ./m3.pl > m3.log 2>&1 &

Fun Fact

You know how those old digital cameras created files prefixed with DSC, like DSC00102.JPG? If you read the JPEG spec, which is a pretty dense document, you learn that DSC stands for Digital Still Camera.

Concept for tossing out pictures of documents

We sometimes take pictures of documents, or computer screens, or a slide at a presentation, or a historical marker. They don’t make for compelling slideshow material. Well, the historical markers are debatable since they have character. Anyway, I am looking at using an old open source program called tesseract to do OCR (optical character recognition) on all the photos to help identify those containing a lot of words so they can be excluded. I’ll include that if I determine it to be a good approach.

Installing a searchable dictionary on Raspberry Pi

To install a word dictionary that you can do simple searches against on an RPi, try:

$ sudo apt-get install wamerican

or maybe

$ sudo apt-get install wamerican-huge

Those will produce simple wordlists, not actual dictionaries with definitions as you might have expected. They go into /usr/share/dict, e.g., usr/share/dict/american-english-huge.

The dict program is quite nice. apt-get install dict. Then you run it like this

$ dict neume

and it shoots back definitions and cites sources for those definitions. The drawback for my purposes is that it uses your Internet connection and I’m trying to build a photo frame that doesn’t rely too much on the Internet after the photos themselves are fetched.

$ sudo apt-cache search wordlist

lists all available dictionaries, I believe.

Setting up tesseract

This page has these instructions

git clone https://github.com/thortex/rpi3-tesseract.git 
cd rpi3-tesseract 
cd release 
./install_requires_related2leptonica.sh ./install_requires_related2tesseract.sh 
./install_tesseract.sh

But you’re gonna need git first:

$ sudo apt-get install git

RPi lost Wifi

This could be a whole separate post. In the course of my hard work my RPi just would not acquire an IP address on wlan0.

Here’s a great command to see all the SSIDs it knows about:

$ sudo iwlist wlan0 scan > scan.log

Then you can inspect scan.log in an editor. Turns out the one SSID it needed wasn’t in the list. Turns out I had reserved a DHCP entry for it in my router. My router was simply not cooperating, it seems – the RPi wasn’t doing anything wrong. I was almost ready to re-install the whole thing and waste hours… My router is an older model Linksys WRT1200AC. I removed the DHCP reservation on the router, then did a

$ sudo service networking stop; sudo service networking start

on the RPi, and…all was good! Its assigned IP won’t change that often, I can always check the router to see what it is. The management software with the Linksys is quite good.

Conclusion

A more advanced treatment of photos is shown in this post than I have done previously. It is fairly robust and will withstand quite a few user errors in my experience. The end result will be an interesting display of your photos, randomly selected but in small groupings.

References and related

The tar file which contains everything: https://drjohnstechtalk.com/blog/downloads/photoFrameII.tar

Please see this popular post Raspberry Pi photo frame using your pictures on your Google Drive for more details.

m3.pl refers to a black.jpg and a newslideshowintro.jpg file. It’s not a disaster to not have those, but the overall experience will be slightly better. Here’s black.jpg:

And the beautiful newslideshowintro.jpg I created is at the top of this blog post.

Tesseract, an surprisingly old and surprisingly good OCR open-source OCR program, is basically impossible to compile for RPi. Fortunately, someone has done it for us. This page has the instructions: https://github.com/thortex/rpi3-tesseract

Categories
Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi advanced photo frame

Intro

I am assembling a lot of different ideas I have to do some more cool things than was possible with my original Raspberry Pi photo frame effort although that contained a lot of original ideas as well.

Skillset

Intermediate or better linux skills required. Beginners/newbies: please do not attempt as you will encounter insurmountable problems and be left in a trail of tears. I don’t have time to help.

I will be using this remote control which I can attest is indeed compatioble with the RPi:

The inexpensive Rii remote controller with keyboard works with your Raspberry Pi

But it has no CTRL key! I can’t survive without that. It seems aimed at media consumers. I guess those types never need that key. At this point in time my idea is to use the arrow keys + Enter button as a familiar way to navigate around a simple menu I plan to create, plus perhaps the menu key. the pre-defined keys fbi has created for navigation are simply not intuitive, nor are they adequate for the tasks I have in mind.

Rii keyValue
up arrow103
down arrow108
right arrow106
left arrow105
Menu127
OK28
Some interesting keys and their values when monitored

In my basic photo frame approach I had a simpler rotate image python script. This python program below rotates pictures by the specified amount and preserves the EXIF tags. It doesn’t update the orientation tag after rotating because for the fbi display program I use that doesn’t matter. I call it rotate.py.

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#!/usr/bin/python3

# call with two arguments: degrees-to-rotate and filename

import PIL, os

import sys

from PIL import Image

# first do: pip3 install piexif

import piexif


degrees = int(sys.argv[1])

pic = sys.argv[2]


picture= Image.open(pic)

# see https://github.com/hMatoba/Piexif for piexif writeup

exif_dict = piexif.load(picture.info[“exif”])

exif_bytes = piexif.dump(exif_dict)

# both rotate and preserve EXIF data

picture.rotate(degrees,expand=True).save(“rot_” + pic,”jpeg”, exif=exif_bytes)

As it says in the code you need to install piexif in addition to Pillow:

$ sudo pip3 install Pillow && sudo pip3 install piexif

Example call

$ ./rotate.py 90 20160514_131528.jpg

Difficult problem

I set for myself a problem that is much more difficult than anything I’ve tackled. I wanted to post a preliminary solution, but I don’t want to do constant re-writes which are time-consuming. I have a lot of code re-writes to do. I do have a menu system working, and a couple functions implemented to date. But there is so much more to do to even get to an alpha version.

To be continued…

Pie-in-the-sky To-Do list

  • Use of deep learning AI to toss out images which are poor quality
  • Use Facebook API to identify people in the images
  • Commercialization of idea
  • Smarthome enablement, e.g., hey Alexa, pause that picture and tell me about it, etc

Breaking those pie-in-the-sky ideas down, I believe the RPi is way vastly underpowered to do any serious image analysis; Facebook facial recognition is creepy and an invasion of privacy; commercialization sounds great on paper but in reality is a time sink doing unpleasant things for little or no profit in the end; and lastly Smarthome enablement is actually the most achievable and was my original thinking before I landed on the remote control. I may or may not get back to it one day.

References and related

A more basic approach to creating a Raspberry Pi – based photo frame is described here.

The Rii remote control I am using only cost $12! https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01CL3ZXGO/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o03_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

A great tutorial on the Pillow python package which I use for image processing: https://auth0.com/blog/image-processing-in-python-with-pillow/

The full documentation fills it out even more: https://pillow.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

The official Exif documentation is here: http://www.cipa.jp/std/documents/e/DC-008-2012_E.pdf . For instance, page 42 says UserComments get the Tag ID 37510.

Categories
Linux Raspberry Pi

How to create a software keyboard

Intro

This example will probably get used in my advanced Raspberry Pi photo frame treatment. I use image display software, fbi, which is designed to take key presses in order to take certain actions, such as, advance to the next picture, display information about the current picture, etc. qiv works similarly. But I am running an automated picture display, so no one is around to type into the keyboard. hence the need for software emulation of the physical keyboard. I’ve always believed it must be possible, but never knew how until this week.

I am not a python programmer, but sometimes you gotta use whatever language makes the job easier, and I only know how to do this in python, python3 specifically.

This will probably only make sense for Raspberry Pi owners.

Setup

I believe this will work best if your Raspberry Pi has only a keyboard and not a mouse hooked up because in that case your keyboard ought to be mapped to /dev/input/event0. But it’s easy enough to change that. To see whether your keyboard is /dev/input/event0 or /dev/input/event1 or some other, just cat one of those files and start typing. You should see some junk when you’ve selected the right /dev/input file.

The program

I call it keyinject.py.

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#!/usr/bin/python3

# inject a single key, acting like a software keyboard

# DrJ 12/20

import sys

from evdev import UInput, InputDevice, ecodes as e

from time import sleep

# set DEBUG = True to print out more information

DEBUG = False

sleepTime = 0.001 # units are secs

# dict of name mappings. key is how we like to enter it, value is what is after KEY_ in evdev ecodes

d = {

 ‘1’    : ‘1’,

 ‘2’    : ‘2’,

 ‘3’    : ‘3’,

 ‘4’    : ‘4’,

 ‘5’    : ‘5’,

 ‘6’    : ‘6’,

 ‘7’    : ‘7’,

 ‘8’    : ‘8’,

 ‘8’    : ‘8’,

 ‘9’    : ‘9’,

 ‘0’    : ‘0’,

 ‘a’ : ‘A’,

 ‘b’ : ‘B’,

 ‘c’ : ‘C’,

 ‘d’ : ‘D’,

 ‘e’ : ‘E’,

 ‘f’ : ‘F’,

 ‘g’ : ‘G’,

 ‘h’ : ‘H’,

 ‘i’ : ‘I’,

 ‘j’ : ‘J’,

 ‘k’ : ‘K’,

 ‘l’ : ‘L’,

 ‘m’ : ‘M’,

 ‘n’ : ‘N’,

 ‘o’ : ‘O’,

 ‘p’ : ‘P’,

 ‘q’ : ‘Q’,

 ‘r’ : ‘R’,

 ‘s’ : ‘S’,

 ‘t’ : ‘T’,

 ‘u’ : ‘U’,

 ‘v’ : ‘V’,

 ‘w’ : ‘W’,

 ‘x’ : ‘X’,

 ‘y’ : ‘Y’,

 ‘z’ : ‘Z’,

 ‘.’    : ‘DOT’,

 ‘,’    : ‘COMMA’,

 ‘/’    : ‘SLASH’,

 ‘E’: ‘ENTER’,

 ‘S’: ‘RIGHTSHIFT’,

 ‘C’: ‘LEFTCTRL’

}


# https://python-evdev.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorial.html

inputchars = sys.argv

ltrs = inputchars[1]

# get rid of program name


keybd = InputDevice(“/dev/input/event0”)


for ltr in ltrs:

  ui = UInput.from_device(keybd, name=”keyboard-device”)

  if DEBUG: print(ltr)

  mappedkey = d[ltr]

  key = “KEY_” + mappedkey

  if DEBUG: print(key)

  if DEBUG: print(e.ecodes[key])


  ui.write(e.EV_KEY, e.ecodes[key], 1) # KEY_ down

  ui.write(e.EV_KEY, e.ecodes[key], 0) # KEY_ up

  ui.syn()

  sleep(sleepTime)

  ui.close()

And it gets called like this:

$ sudo ./keyinject.py my.injected.letters

or

$ sudo ./keyinject.py ./m2.plE

to run the m2.pl script in the current directory and have it behave as though it were launched from a console terminal. The “E” is the ENTER key.

Interesting observations

There really is no such thing as a separate “k” key and “K” key (lower-case versus upper-case). There is only a single key labelled “K” on a keyboard. It’s a physical layer versus logical layer type of thing. The k and K are characters.

In the above program I did some of the keys – the ones I will be needing, plus a few bonus ones. I do need the ENTER key, and I can’t think of a way to convey that to this program, so to send ENTER you would do

$ sudo ./keyinject.py ENTER

But I was able to have these characters represent themselves: . , / so that’s not bad.

Prerequisites

You will need pyhon3 version > 3.5, I think. And the evdev package. I believe you get that with

$ sudo pip3 install evdev

And if you don’t have pip3 you can install that with

$ sudo apt-get update python3-pip

Reading keyboard input

Of course the opposite of simulating key presses is reading what’s been typed from an actual keyboard. That’s possible too with this handy evdev package. The following program is not as polished as the writing program, but it gives you the feel for what to do. I call it evread.py.

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#!/usr/bin/python3

# https://python-evdev.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorial.html

import asyncio

from evdev import InputDevice, categorize, ecodes


dev = InputDevice(‘/dev/input/event0’)

# following line is optional – it takes away the keybd from fbi!

# there is also a dev.ungrab()

dev.grab()


async def helper(dev):

    async for ev in dev.async_read_loop():

         print(repr(ev))


loop = asyncio.get_event_loop()

loop.run_until_complete(helper(dev))

Note the presence of the dev.grab(). That permits your program to be the exclusive reader of keyboard input, shutting out fbi. It can be commented out if you want to share.

Conclusion

We have created an example program, mostly for Raspberry Pi, though easily adapted to other linux environments, that injects keyboard presses, via a python3 program, as though those keys had been typed by someone using the physical keyboard such that, graphics programs which rely on this, such as fbi or qiv (and probably others – vlc?), can be controlled through software.

We have also provided a basic python program for reading key presses from the actual keyboard. I plan to use these things for my advanced RPi photo frame project.

References and related

The python evdev tutorial is really helpful: https://python-evdev.readthedocs.iogeoh/en/latest/tutorial.html

Raspberry Pi advanced photo frame article does not exist yet. The basic RPi photo frame article is here.

Another piece to the puzzle is turning GPS coordinates into a town name. That brief write-up is here.

Categories
Linux Perl Raspberry Pi Web Site Technologies

Convert GPS Coordinates into town name or address

Intro

This is a small piece of a larger project – displaying your photos on Google Drive using a Raspberry Pi. That project will require completion of many small investigations, this being just one of them.

I thought, wouldn’t it be cool to ask your photo frame when and where a certain picture was taken? I thought that information was typically embedded into the picture by modern smartphones. Turns out this is disappointingly not the case – at least not on our smartphones, except in a small minority of pictures. But since I got somewhere with my investigation, I wanted to share the results, regardless.

Also, I naively assumed that there surely is a web service that permits one to easily convert GPS coordinates into the name – in text – of the closest town. After all, you can enter GPS coordinates into Google Maps and get back a map showing the exact location. Why shouldn’t it be just as easy to extract the nearest town name as text? Again, this assumption turns out to be faulty. But, I found a way to do it that is not toooo difficult.

Example for Cape May, New Jersey

$ curl -s http://api.geonames.org/address?lat=38.9302957777778&lng=-74.9183310833333&username=drjohns

<geonames>
<address>
<street>Beach Dr</street>
<houseNumber>690</houseNumber>
<locality>Cape May</locality>
<postalcode>08204</postalcode>
<lng>-74.91835</lng>
<lat>38.93054</lat>
<adminCode1>NJ</adminCode1>
<adminName1>New Jersey</adminName1>
<adminCode2>009</adminCode2>
<adminName2>Cape May</adminName2>
<adminCode3/>
<adminCode4/>
<countryCode>US</countryCode>
<distance>0.03</distance>
</address>
</geonames>

The above example used the address service. The results in this case are unusually complete. Sometime the lookups simply fail for no obvious reason, or provide incomplete information, such as a missing locality. In those cases the town name is usually still reported in the adminName2 element. I haven’t checked the address accuracy much, but it seems pretty accurate, like, representing an actual address within 100 yards, usually better, of where the picture was taken.

They have another service, findNearbyPlaceName, which sometimes works even when address fails. However its results are also unpredictable. I was in Merrillville, Indiana and it gave the toponym as Chapel Manor, which is the name of the subdivision! In Virginia it gave the name The Hamlet – still not sure where that came from, but I trust it is some hyper-local name for a section of the town (James City). Just as often it does spit back the town or city name, for instance, Atlantic City. So, it’s better than nothing.

The example for Nantucket

From a browser – here I use curl in the linux command line – you enter:

$ curl -s http://api.geonames.org/findNearbyPlaceName?lat=41.282778&lng=-70.099444&username=drjohns

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?>
<geonames>
<geoname>
<toponymName>Nantucket</toponymName>
<name>Nantucket</name>
<lat>41.28346</lat>
<lng>-70.09946</lng>
<geonameId>4944903</geonameId>
<countryCode>US</countryCode>
<countryName>United States</countryName>
<fcl>P</fcl>
<fcode>PPLA2</fcode>
<distance>0.07534</distance>
</geoname>
</geonames>

So what did we do? For this example I looked up Nantucket in Wikipedia to find its GPS coordinates. Then I used the geonames api to convert those coordinates into the town name, Nantucket.

Note that drjohns is an actual registered username with geonames. I am counting on the unpopularity of my posts to prevent an onslaught of usage as the usage credits are limited for free accounts. If I understood the terms, a few lookups per hour would not be an issue.

I’m finding the PlaceName lookup pretty useless, the address lookup fails about 30% of the time, so I’m thinking as a backstop to use this sort of lookup:

$ curl ‘http://api.geonames.org/extendedFindNearby?lat=41.00050&lng=-74.65329&username=drjohn’

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″ standalone=”no”?>
<geonames>
<address>
<street>Stanhope Rd</street>
<mtfcc>S1400</mtfcc>
<streetNumber>439</streetNumber>
<lat>41.00072</lat>
<lng>-74.6554</lng>
<distance>0.18</distance>
<postalcode>07871</postalcode>
<placename>Lake Mohawk</placename>
<adminCode2>037</adminCode2>
<adminName2>Sussex</adminName2>
<adminCode1>NJ</adminCode1>
<adminName1>New Jersey</adminName1>
<countryCode>US</countryCode>
</address>
</geonames>

Note that gets a reasonably close address, and more importantly, a zipcode. The placename is too local and I will probably discard it. But another lookup can turn a zipcode into a town or city name which is what I am after.

$ curl ‘http://api.geonames.org/postalCodeSearch?country=US&postalcode=07871&username=drjohns’

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″ standalone=”no”?>
<geonames>
<totalResultsCount>1</totalResultsCount>
<code>
<postalcode>07871</postalcode>
<name>Sparta</name>
<countryCode>US</countryCode>
<lat>41.0277</lat>
<lng>-74.6407</lng>
<adminCode1 ISO3166-2=”NJ”>NJ</adminCode1>
<adminName1>New Jersey</adminName1>
<adminCode2>037</adminCode2>
<adminName2>Sussex</adminName2>
<adminCode3/>
<adminName3/>
</code>
</geonames>

See? It was a lot of work, but we finally got the township name, Sparta, returned to us.

Ocean GPS?

I was whale-watching and took some pictures with GPS info. Trying to apply the methods above worked, but just barely. Basically all I could get out of the extended find nearby search was a name field with value North Atlantic Ocean! Well, that makes it sounds like I was on some Titanic-style ocean crossing. In fact I was in the Gulf of Maine a few miles from Provincetown. So they really could have done a better job there… Of course it’s understandable to not have a postalcode and street address and such. But still, bodies of waters have names and geographical boundaries as well. Casinos seem to be the main sponsors of geonames.org, and I guess they don’t care. Yesterday my script came up with a location Earth! But now I see geonames proposed several locations and I only look at the first one. I am creating a refinement which will perform better in such cases. Stay tuned… And…yes…the refinement is done. I had to do a wee bit of xml parsing, which I now do.

To get your own account at geonames.org

The process of getting your own account isn’t too difficult, just a bit squirrelly. For the record, here is what you do.

Go to http://www.geonames.org/login to create your account. It sends an email confirmation. Oh. Be sure to use a unique browser-generated password for this one. The security level is off-the-charts awful – just assume that any and all hackers who want that password are going to get it. It sends you a confirmation email. so far so good. But when you then try to use it in an api call it will tell you that that username isn’t known. This is the tricky part.

So go to https://www.geonames.org/manageaccount . It will say:

Free Web Services
the account is not yet enabled to use the free web services. Click here to enable.

And that link, in turn is https://www.geonames.org/enablefreewebservice . And having enabled your account for the api web service, the URL, where you’ve put your username in place of drjohns, ought to work!

For a complete overview of all the different things you can find out from the GPS coordinates from geonames, look at this link: https://www.geonames.org/export/ws-overview.html

Working with pictures

Please look at this post for the python code to extract the metadata from an image, including, if available GPS info. I called the python program getinfo.py.

Here’s an actual example of running it to learn the GPS info:

$ ../getinfo.py 20170520_102248.jpg|grep -ai gps

GPSInfo = {0: b'\x02\x02\x00\x00', 1: 'N', 2: (42.0, 2.0, 18.6838), 3: 'W', 4: (70.0, 4.0, 27.5448), 5: b'\x00', 6: 0.0, 7: (14.0, 22.0, 25.0), 29: '2017:05:20'}

I don’t know if it’s good or bad, but the GPS coordinates seem to be encoded in the degrees, minutes, seconds format.

A nice little program to put things together

I call it analyzeGPS.pl and a, using it on a Raspberry Pi, but could easily be adapted to any linux system.

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#!/usr/bin/perl
# use in combination with this post https://drjohnstechtalk.com/blog/2020/12/convert-gps-coordinates-into-town-name/
use POSIX;
$DEBUG = 1;
$HOME = "/home/pi";
#$file = "Pictures/20180422_134220.jpg";
while(<>){
$GPS = $date = 0;
$gpsinfo = "";
$file = $_;
open(ANAL,"$HOME/getinfo.py \"$file\"|") || die "Cannot open file: $file!!\n";
#open(ANAL,"cat \"$file\"|") || die "Cannot open file: $file!!\n";
print STDERR "filename: $file\n" if $DEBUG;
while(<ANAL>){
  $postalcode = $town = $name = "";
  if (/GPS/i) {
    print STDERR "GPS: $_" if $DEBUG;
# GPSInfo = {1: 'N', 2: (39.0, 21.0, 22.5226), 3: 'W', 4: (74.0, 25.0, 40.0267), 5: 1.7, 6: 0.0, 7: (23.0, 4.0, 14.0), 29: '2016:07:22'}
   ($pole,$deg,$min,$sec,$hemi,$lngdeg,$lngmin,$lngsec) = /1: '([NS])', 2: \(([\d\.]+), ([\d\.]+), ([\d\.]+)...3: '([EW])', 4: \(([\d\.]+), ([\d\.]+), ([\d\.]+)\)/i;
   print STDERR "$pole,$deg,$min,$sec,$hemi,$lngdeg,$lngmin,$lngsec\n" if $DEBUG;
   $lat = $deg + $min/60.0 + $sec/3600.0;
   $lat = -$lat if $pole eq "S";
   $lng = $lngdeg + $lngmin/60.0 + $lngsec/3600.0;
   $lng = -$lng if $hemi = "W" || $hemi eq "w";
   print STDERR "lat,lng: $lat, $lng\n" if $DEBUG;
   #$placename = `curl -s "$url"|grep -i toponym`;
   next if $lat == 0 && $lng == 0;
# the address API is the most precise
   $url = "http://api.geonames.org/address?lat=$lat\&lng=$lng\&username=drjohns";
   print STDERR "Url: $url\n" if $DEBUG;
   $results = `curl -s "$url"|egrep -i 'street|house|locality|postal|adminName'`;
   print STDERR "results: $results\n" if $DEBUG;
   ($street) = $results =~ /street>(.+)</;
   ($houseNumber) = $results =~ /houseNumber>(.+)</;
   ($postalcode) = $results =~ /postalcode>(.+)</;
   ($state) = $results =~ /adminName1>(.+)</;
   ($town) = $results =~ /locality>(.+)</;
   print STDERR "street, houseNumber, postalcode, state, town: $street, $houseNumber, $postalcode, $state, $town\n" if $DEBUG;
# I think locality is pretty good name. If it exists, don't go  further
   $postalcode = "" if $town;
   if (!$postalcode && !$town){
# we are here if we didn't get interesting results from address reverse loookup, which often happens.
     $url = "http://api.geonames.org/extendedFindNearby?lat=$lat\&lng=$lng\&username=drjohns";
     print STDERR "Address didn't work out. Trying extendedFindNearby instead. Url: $url\n" if $DEBUG;
     $results = `curl -s "$url"`;
# parse results - there may be several objects returned
     $topelemnt = $results =~ /<geoname>/i ? "geoname" : "geonames";
     @elmnts = ("street","streetnumber","lat","lng","locality","postalcode","countrycode","countryname","name","adminName2","adminName1");
     $cnt = xml1levelparse($results,$topelemnt,@elmnts);

     @lati = @{ $xmlhash{lat}};
     @long = @{ $xmlhash{lng}};
# find the closest entry
     $distmax = 1E7;
     for($i=0;$i<$cnt;$i++){
       $dist = ($lat - $lati[$i])**2 + ($lng - $long[$i])**2;
       print STDERR "dist,lati,long: $dist, $lati[$i], $long[$i]\n" if $DEBUG;
       if ($dist < $distmax) {
         print STDERR "dist < distmax condition. i is: $i\n";
         $isave = $i;
       }
     }
     $street = @{ $xmlhash{street}}[$isave];
     $houseNumber = @{ $xmlhash{streetnumber}}[$isave];
     $admn2 = @{ $xmlhash{adminName2}}[$isave];
     $postalcode = @{ $xmlhash{postalcode}}[$isave];
     $name = @{ $xmlhash{name}}[$isave];
     $countrycode = @{ $xmlhash{countrycode}}[$isave];
     $countryname = @{ $xmlhash{countryname}}[$isave];
     $state = @{ $xmlhash{adminName1}}[$isave];
     print STDERR "street, houseNumber, postalcode, state, admn2, name: $street, $houseNumber, $postalcode, $state, $admn2, $name\n" if $DEBUG;
     if ($countrycode ne "US"){
       $state .= " $countryname";
     }
     $state .= " (approximate)";
   }
# turn zipcode into town name with this call
   if ($postalcode) {
     print STDERR "postalcode $postalcode exists, let's convert to a town name\n";
     print STDERR "url: $url\n";
     $url = "http://api.geonames.org/postalCodeSearch?country=US\&postalcode=$postalcode\&username=drjohns";
     $results = `curl -s "$url"|egrep -i 'name|locality|adminName'`;
     ($town) = $results =~ /<name>(.+)</i;
     print STDERR "results,town: $results,$town\n";
   }
   if (!$town) {
# no town name, use adminname2 which is who knows what in general
     print STDERR "Stil no town name. Use adminName2 as next best thing\n";
     $town = $admn2;
   }
   if (!$town) {
# we could be in the ocean! I saw that once, and name was North Atlantic Ocean
     print STDERR "Still no town. Try to use name: $name as last resort\n";
     $town = $name;
   }
   $gpsinfo = "$houseNumber $street $town, $state" if $locality || $town;
   } # end of GPS info exists condition
  } # end loop over ANAL file
  $gpsinfo = $gpsinfo || "No info found";
  print qq(Location: $gpsinfo
);
} # end loop over STDIN

#####################
# function to parse some xml and fill a hash of arrays
sub xml1levelparse{
# build an array of hashes
$string = shift;
# strip out newline chars
$string =~ s/\n//g;
$parentelement = shift;
@elements = @_;
$i=0;
while($string =~ /<$parentelement>/i){
 $i++;
 ($childelements) = $string =~ /<$parentelement>(.+?)<\/$parentelement>/i;
 print STDERR "childelements: $childelements" if $DEBUG;
 $string =~ s/<$parentelement>(.+?)<\/$parentelement>//i;
 print STDERR "string: $string\n" if $DEBUG;
 foreach $element (@elements){
  print STDERR "element: $element\n" if $DEBUG;
  ($value) = $childelements =~ /<$element>([^<]+)<\/$element>/i;
  print STDERR "value: $value\n" if $DEBUG;
  push @{ $xmlhash{$element} }, $value;
 }
} # end of loop over parent elements
return $i;
} # end sub xml1levelparse

Here’s a real example of calling it, one of the more difficult cases:

$ echo -n 20180127_212203.jpg|./analyzeGPS.pl

GPS: GPSInfo = {0: b'\x02\x02\x00\x00', 1: 'N', 2: (41.0, 0.0, 2.75), 3: 'W', 4: (74.0, 39.0, 12.0934), 5: b'\x00', 6: 0.0, 7: (2.0, 21.0, 58.0), 29: '2018:01:28'}
N,41.0,0.0,2.75,W,74.0,39.0,12.0934
lat,lng: 41.0007638888889, -74.6533592777778
Url: http://api.geonames.org/address?lat=41.0007638888889&lng=-74.6533592777778&username=drjohns
results:
street, houseNumber, postalcode, state, town: , , , ,
Address didn't work out. Trying extendedFindNearby instead. Url: http://api.geonames.org/extendedFindNearby?lat=41.0007638888889&lng=-74.6533592777778&username=drjohns
childelements: <address> <street>Stanhope Rd</street> <mtfcc>S1400</mtfcc> <streetNumber>433</streetNumber> <lat>41.00121</lat> <lng>-74.65528</lng> <distance>0.17</distance> <postalcode>07871</postalcode> <placename>Lake Mohawk</placename> <adminCode2>037</adminCode2> <adminName2>Sussex</adminName2> <adminCode1>NJ</adminCode1> <adminName1>New Jersey</adminName1> <countryCode>US</countryCode> </address>string: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?>
element: street
value: Stanhope Rd
element: streetnumber
value: 433
element: lat
value: 41.00121
element: lng
value: -74.65528
element: locality
value:
element: postalcode
value: 07871
element: countrycode
value: US
element: countryname
value:
element: name
value:
element: adminName2
value: Sussex
element: adminName1
value: New Jersey
dist,lati,long: 3.88818897839883e-06, 41.00121, -74.65528
dist < distmax condition. i is: 0
street, houseNumber, postalcode, state, admn2, name: Stanhope Rd, 433, 07871, New Jersey, Sussex,
postalcode 07871 exists, let's convert to a town name
url: http://api.geonames.org/extendedFindNearby?lat=41.0007638888889&lng=-74.6533592777778&username=drjohns
results,town: <geonames>
<name>Sparta</name>
<adminName1>New Jersey</adminName1>
<adminName2>Sussex</adminName2>
<adminName3/>
</geonames>
,Sparta
Location: 433 Stanhope Rd Sparta, New Jersey (approximate)

Or, if you just want the interesting stuff,

$ echo -n 20180127_212203.jpg|./analyzeGPS.pl 2>/dev/null

Location: 433 Stanhope Rd Sparta, New Jersey (approximate)

Conclusion

An api for reverse lookup of GPS coordinates which returns the nearest address, including town name, is available. I have provided examples of how to use it. It is unreliable, however, and Geonames.org does provide alternatives which have their own drawbacks. In my image gallery, only a minority of my pictures have encoded GPS data, but it is fun to work with them to pluck out the town where they were shot.

I have incorporated this functionality into a Raspberry Pi-based photo frame I am working on.

I have created an example Perl program that analyzes a JPEG image to extract the GPS information and turn it into an address that is remarkably accurate. It is amazing and uncanny to see it at work. It deals with the screwy and inconsistent results returned by the free service, Geonames.org.

References and related

There are lots of different things you can derive given the GPS coordinates using the Geonames api. Here is a list: https://www.geonames.org/export/ws-overview.html

In this photo frame version of mine, I extract all the EXIF metadata which includes the GPS info.

One day my advanced photo frame will hopefully include an option to learn where a photo was taken by interacting with a remote control. Here is the start of that write-up.

You can pay $5 and get a zip codes to cities database in any format. I’m sure they’ve just re-packaged data from elsewhere, but it might be worth it: https://www.uszipcodeslist.com/

For a more professional api, https://smartystreets.com/ looks quite nice. Free level is 250 queries per month, so not too many. But their documentation and usability looks good to me. For this post I was looking for free services and have tried to avoid commercial services.

Categories
Perl Python Raspberry Pi Web Site Technologies

Raspberry Pi photo frame using your pictures on your Google Drive

Editor’s Note

Please note I am putting all my currently active development and latest updates into this newer post: Raspberry Pi photo frame using your pictures on your Google Drive II

Intro

All my spouse’s digital photo frames are either broken or nearly broken – probably she got them from garage sales. Regardless, they spend 99% of the the time black. Now, since I had bought that Raspberry Pi PiDisplay awhile back, and it is underutilized, and I know a thing or two about linux, I felt I could create a custom photo frame with things I already have lying around – a Raspberry Pi 3, a PiDisplay, and my personal Google Drive. We make a point to copy all our cameras’ pictures onto the Google Drive, which we do the old-fashioned, by-hand way. After 17 years of digital photos we have about 40,000 of them, over 200 GB.

So I also felt obliged to create features you will never have in a commercial product, to make the effort worthwhile. I thought, what about randomly picking a few for display from amongst all the pictures, displaying that subset for a few days, and then moving on to a new randomly selected sample of images, etc? That should produce a nice review of all of them over time, eventually. You need an approach like that because you will never get to the end if you just try to display 40000 images in order!

Equipment

This work was done on a Raspberry Pi 3 running Raspbian Lite (more on that later). I used a display custom-built for the RPi, Amazon.com: Raspberry Pi 7″ Touch Screen Display: Electronics), though I believe any HDMI display would do.

The scripts
Here is the master file which I call master.sh.

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#!/bin/sh

# DrJ 8/2019

# call this from cron once a day to refesh random slideshow once a day

RANFILE=”random.list”

NUMFOLDERS=20

DISPLAYFOLDER=”/home/pi/Pictures”

DISPLAYFOLDERTMP=”/home/pi/Picturestmp”

SLEEPINTERVAL=3

DEBUG=1

STARTFOLDER=”MaryDocs/Pictures and videos”


echo “Starting master process at “`date`


rm -rf $DISPLAYFOLDERTMP

mkdir $DISPLAYFOLDERTMP


#listing of all Google drive files starting from the picture root

if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo Listing all files from Google drive; fi

rclone ls remote:”$STARTFOLDER” > files


# filter down to only jpegs, lose the docs folders

if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo Picking out the JPEGs; fi

egrep ‘\.[jJ][pP][eE]?[gG]$’ files |awk ‘$1 > 11000 {$1=””; print substr($0,2)}’|grep -i -v /docs/ > jpegs.list


# throw NUMFOLDERS or so random numbers for picture selection, select triplets of photos by putting

# names into a file

if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo Generate random filename triplets; fi

./random-files.pl -f $NUMFOLDERS -j jpegs.list -r $RANFILE


# copy over these 60 jpegs

if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo Copy over these random files; fi

cat $RANFILE|while read line; do

  rclone copy remote:”${STARTFOLDER}/$line” $DISPLAYFOLDERTMP

  sleep $SLEEPINTERVAL

done


# rotate pics as needed

if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo Rotate the pics which need it; fi

cd $DISPLAYFOLDERTMP; ~/rotate-as-needed.sh

cd ~


# kill any qiv slideshow

if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo Killing old qiv and fbi slideshow; fi

pkill -9 -f qiv

sudo pkill -9 -f fbi

pkill -9 -f m2.pl


# remove old pics

if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo Removing old pictures; fi

rm -rf $DISPLAYFOLDER


mv $DISPLAYFOLDERTMP $DISPLAYFOLDER


#run looping fbi slideshow on these pictures

if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo Start fbi slideshow in background; fi

cd $DISPLAYFOLDER ; nohup ~/m2.pl  >> ~/m2.log 2>&1 &


if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo “And now it is “`date`; fi

I call the following script random-files.pl:

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#!/usr/bin/perl
use Getopt::Std;
my %opt=();
getopts("c:df:j:r:",\%opt);
$nofolders = $opt{f} ? $opt{f} : 20;
$DEBUG = $opt{d} ? 1 : 0;
$cutoff = $opt{c} ? $opt{c} : 5;
$cutoffS = 60*$cutoff;
$jpegs = $opt{j} ? $opt{j} : "jpegs.list";
$ranpicfile = $opt{r} ? $opt{r} : "jpegs-random.list";
print "d,f,j,r: $opt{d}, $opt{f}, $opt{j}, $opt{r}\n" if $DEBUG;
open(JPEGS,$jpegs) || die "Cannot open jpegs listing file $jpegs!!\n";
@jpegs = ;
# remove newline character
$nopics = chomp @jpegs;
open(RAN,"> $ranpicfile") || die "Cannot open random picture file $ranpicfile!!\n";
for($i=0;$i<$nofolders;$i++) {
  $t = int(rand($nopics-2));
  print "random number is: $t\n" if $DEBUG;
# a lot of our pics follow this naming convention
# 20160831_090658.jpg
  ($date,$time) = $jpegs[$t] =~ /(\d{8})_(\d{6})/;
  if ($date) {
    print "date, time: $date $time\n" if $DEBUG;
# ensure neighboring picture is at least five minutes different in time
    $iPO = $iP = $diff = 0;
    ($hr,$min,$sec) = $time =~ /(\d\d)(\d\d)(\d\d)/;
    $secs = 3600*$hr + 60*$min + $sec;
    print "Pre-pic logic\n";
    while ($diff < $cutoffS) {
      $iP++;
      $priorPic = $jpegs[$t-$iP];
      $Pdate = $Ptime = 0;
      ($Pdate,$Ptime) = $priorPic =~ /(\d{8})_(\d{6})/;
      ($Phr,$Pmin,$Psec) = $Ptime =~ /(\d\d)(\d\d)(\d\d)/;
      $Psecs = 3600*$Phr + 60*$Pmin + $Psec;
      print "hr,min,sec,Phr,Pmin,Psec: $hr,$min,$sec,$Phr,$Pmin,$Psec\n" if $DEBUG;
      $diff = abs($secs - $Psecs);
      print "diff: $diff\n" if $DEBUG;
# end our search if we happened upon different dates
      $diff = 99999 if $Pdate ne $date;
    }
# post-picture logic - same as pre-picture
    print "Post-pic logic\n";
    $diff = 0;
    while ($diff < $cutoffS) {
      $iPO++;
      $postPic = $jpegs[$t+$iPO];
      $Pdate = $Ptime = 0;
      ($Pdate,$Ptime) = $postPic =~ /(\d{8})_(\d{6})/;
      ($Phr,$Pmin,$Psec) = $Ptime =~ /(\d\d)(\d\d)(\d\d)/;
      $Psecs = 3600*$Phr + 60*$Pmin + $Psec;
      print "hr,min,sec,Phr,Pmin,Psec: $hr,$min,$sec,$Phr,$Pmin,$Psec\n" if $DEBUG;
      $diff = abs($Psecs - $secs);
      print "diff: $diff\n" if $DEBUG;
# end our search if we happened upon different dates
      $diff = 99999 if $Pdate ne $date;
    }
  } else {
    $iP = $iPO = 2;
  }
  $priorPic = $jpegs[$t-$iP];
  $Pic = $jpegs[$t];
  $postPic = $jpegs[$t+$iPO];
  print RAN qq($priorPic
$Pic
$postPic
);
}
close(RAN);

Bunch of simple python scripts

I call this one getinfo.py:

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#!/usr/bin/python3

import os,sys

from PIL import Image

from PIL.ExifTags import TAGS


for (tag,value) in Image.open(sys.argv[1])._getexif().items():

        print (‘%s = %s’ % (TAGS.get(tag), value))


print (‘%s = %s’ % (TAGS.get(tag), value))

And here’s rotate.py:

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#!/usr/bin/python3

import PIL, os

import sys

from PIL import Image


picture= Image.open(sys.argv[1])


# if orientation is 6, rotate clockwise 90 degrees

picture.rotate(-90,expand=True).save(“rot_” + sys.argv[1])

While here is rotatecc.py:

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#!/usr/bin/python3

import PIL, os

import sys

from PIL import Image


picture= Image.open(sys.argv[1])


# if orientation is 8, rotate counterclockwise 90 degrees

picture.rotate(90,expand=True).save(“rot_” + sys.argv[1])

And rotate-as-needed.sh:

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#!/bin/sh

# DrJ 12/2020

# some of our downloaded files will be sideways, and fbi doesn’t auto-rotate them as far as I know

# assumption is that are current directory is the one where we want to alter files

ls -1|while read line; do

  echo fileis “$line”

  o=`~/getinfo.py “$line”|grep -ai orientation|awk ‘{print $NF}’`

  echo orientation is $o

  if [ “$o” -eq “6” ]; then

    echo “90 clockwise is needed, o is $o”

# rotate and move it

    ~/rotate.py “$line”

    mv rot_”$line” “$line”

  elif [ “$o” -eq “8” ]; then

    echo “90 counterclock is needed, o is $o”

# rotate and move it

    ~/rotatecc.py “$line”

    mv rot_”$line” “$line”

  fi

don

And finally, m2.pl:

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#!/usr/bin/perl
# show the pics ; rotate the screen as needed
# for now, assume the display is in a neutral
# orientation at the start
use Time::HiRes qw(usleep);
$DEBUG = 1;
$delay = 6; # seconds between pics
$mdelay = 200; # milliseconds
$mshow = "$ENV{HOME}/mediashow";
$pNames = "$ENV{HOME}/pNames";
# pics are here
$picsDir = "$ENV{HOME}/Pictures";

chdir($picsDir);
system("ls -1 > $pNames");
# forther massage names
open(TMP,"$pNames");
@lines = ;
foreach (@lines) {
  chomp;
  $filesNullSeparated .= $_ . "\0";
}
open(MS,">$mshow") || die "Cannot open mediashow file $mshow!!\n";
print MS $filesNullSeparated;
close(MS);
print "filesNullSeparated: $filesNullSeparated\n" if $DEBUG;
$cn = @lines;
print "$cn files\n" if $DEBUG;
# throw up a first picture - all black. Trick to make black bckgrd permanent
system("sudo fbi -a --noverbose -T 1 $ENV{HOME}/black.jpg");
system("sudo fbi -a --noverbose -T 1 $ENV{HOME}/black.jpg");
sleep(1);
system("sleep 2; sudo killall fbi");
# start infinitely looping fbi slideshow
for (;;) {
# then start slide show
# shell echo cannot work with null character so we need to use a file to store it
    #system("cat $picNames|xargs -0 qiv -DfRsmi -d $delay \&");
    system("sudo xargs -a $mshow -0 fbi -a --noverbose -1 -T 1  -t $delay ");
# fbi runs in background, then exits, so we need to monitor if it's still alive
# wait appropriate estimated amount of time, then look aggressively for fbi
    sleep($delay*($cn - 2));
    for(;;) {
      open(MON,"ps -ef|grep fbi|grep -v grep|") || die "Cannot launch ps -ef!!\n";
      $match = ;
      if ($match) {
        print "got fbi match\n" if $DEBUG > 1;
        } else {
        print "no fbi match\n" if $DEBUG;
# fbi not found
          last;
      }
      close(MON);
      print "usleeping, noexist is $noexit\n" if $DEBUG > 1;
      usleep($mdelay);
    } # end loop testing if fbi has exited
} # close of infinite loop

You’ll need to make these files executable. Something like this should work:

$ chmod +x *.py *.pl *.sh

My crontab file looks like this (you edit crontab using the crontab -e command):

@reboot sleep 25; cd ~ ; ./m2.pl >> ./m2.log 2>&1
24 16 * * * ./master.sh >> ./master.log 2>&1

This invokes master.sh once a day at 4:24 PM to refresh the 60 photos. My refresh took about 13 minutes the other day, but the old slideshow keeps playing until almost the last second, so it’s OK.

The nice thing about this approach is that fbi works with a lightweight OS – Raspbian Lite is fine, you’ll just need to install a few packages. My SD card is unstable or something, so I have to re-install the OS periodically. An install of Raspberry Pi Lite on my RPi 4 took 11 minutes. Anyway, fbi is installed via:

$ sudo apt-get install fbi

But if your RPi is freshly installed, you may first need to do a

$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

python image manipulation

The drawback of this approach, i.e., not using qiv, is that we gotta do some image manipulation, for which python is the best candidate. I’m going by memory. I believe I installed python3, perhaps as sudo apt-get install python3. Then I needed pip3: sudo apt-get install python3-pip. Then I needed to install Pillow using pip3: sudo pip3 install Pillow.

m2.pl refers to a black.jpg file. It’s not a disaster to not have that, but under some circumstances it may help. There it is!

Many of my photos do not have EXIF information, yet they can still be displayed. So for those photos running getinfo.py will produce an error (but the processing of the other photos will continue.)

I was originally rotating the display 90 degrees as needed to display the photos with the using the maximum amount of display real estate. But that all broke when I tried to revive it. And the cheap servo motor was noisy. But folks were pretty impressed when I demoed it, because I did it get it the point where it was indeed working correctly.

Picture selection methodology

There are 20 “folders” (random numbers) of three triplets each. The idea is to give you additional context to help jog your memory. The triplets, with some luck, will often be from the same time period.

I observed how many similar pictures are adjacent to each other amongst our total collection. To avoid identical pictures, I require the pictures to be five minutes apart in time. Well, I cheated. I don’t pull out the timestamp from the EXIF data as I should (at least not yet – future enhancement, perhaps). But I rely on a file-naming convention I notice is common – 20201227_134508.jpg, which basically is a timestamp-encoded name. The last six digits are HHMMSS in case it isn’t clear.

Rclone

You must install the rclone package, sudo apt-get install rclone.

Can you configure rclone on a headless Raspberry Pi?

Indeed you can. I know because I just did it. You enable your Pi for ssh access. do the rclone-config (or whatever it’s called) using putty from a Windows 10 system. You’ll get a long Google URL in the course of configuring that you can paste into your browser. You verify it’s you, log into your Google account. Then you get back a url like http://127.0.0.1:5462/another-long-url-string. Well, put that url into your clipboard and in another login window, enter curl clipboard_contents

That’s what I did, not certain it would work, but I saw it go through in my rclone-config window, and that was that!

Don’t want to deal with rclone?

So you want to use a traditional flash drive you plug in to a USB port, just like you have for the commerical photo frames, but you otherwise like my approach of randomizing the picture selection each day? I’m sure that is possible. A mid-level linux person could rip out the rclone stuff I have embedded and replace as needed with filesystem commands. I’m imagining a colossal flash drive with all your tens of thousands of pictures on it where my random selection still adds value. If this post becomes popular enough perhapsI will post exactly how to do it.

Getting started with this

After you’ve done all that, and want to try it out. you can run

$ ./master.sh

First you should see a file called files growing in size – that’s rclone doing its listing. That takes a few minutes. Then it generates random numbers for photo selection – that’s very fast, maybe a second. Then it slowly copies over the selected images to a temporary folder called Picturestmp. That’s the slowest part. If you do a directory listing you should see the number of images in that directory growing slowly, adding maybe three per minute until it reaches 60 of them. Finally the rotation are applied. But even if you didn’t set up your python environment correctly, it doesn’t crash. It effectively skips the rotations. A rotation takes a couple seconds per image. Finally all the images are copied over to the production area, the directory called Pictures; the old slideshow program is “killed,” and the new slideshow starts up. Whole process takes around 15 minutes.

I highly recommend running master.sh by hand as just described to make sure it all works. Probably some of it won’t. I don’t specialize in making recipes, more just guidance. But if you’re feeling really bold you can just power it up and wait a day (because initially you won’t have any pictures in your slideshow) and pray that it all works.

Still missing

I’d like to display a transition image when switching from the current set of photos to the new ones.

Suppressing boot up messages might be nice for some. Personally I think they’re kind of cool – makes it look like you’ve done a lot more techie work than you actually have!

You’re going to get some junk images. I’ve seen where an image is a thumbnail (I guess) and gets blown up full screen so that you see these giant blocks of pixels. I could perhaps magnify those kind of images less.

Movies are going to be tricky so let’s not even go there…

I was thinking about making it a navigation-enabled photo frame, such as integration with a Gameboy controller. You could do some really awesome stuff: Pause this picture; display the location (town or city) where this photo was taken; refresh the slideshow. It sounds fantastical, but I don’t think it’s beyond the capability of even modestly capable hobbyist programmers such as myself.

I may still spin the frame 90 degrees this way an that. I have the servo mounted and ready. Just got to revive the control commands for it.

References and related

This 7″ display is a little small, but it’s great to get you started. It’s $64 at Amazon: Amazon.com: Raspberry Pi 7″ Touch Screen Display: Electronics

I have an older approach using qiv which I lost the files for, and my blog post got corrupted. Hence this new approach.

In this slightly more sophisticated approach, I make a greater effort to separate the photos in time. But I also make a whole bunch of other improvements as well. But it’s a lot more files so it may only be appropriate for a more seasoned RPi command-line user.

My advanced slideshow treatment is beginning to take shape. I just add to it while I develop it, so check it periodically if that is of interest. Raspberry Pi advanced photo frame.

Categories
Consumer Interest Consumer Tech Network Technologies Raspberry Pi

Consumer Tech: Home Internet stopped working

Intro

We woke up yesterday to no Internet. The usual remedies consumers go through did nothing to resolve the issue. What to do?

The details – November 25, 2020

The usual restarts or my router and the cable modem did not work. I plugged in my work laptop directly to the cable modem for some quick tests but that did not work.

I plugged my work-issued VPN router directly to the cable modem and it did not pick up an IP and re-establish the tunnel.

When I logged into my router I saw that its WAN IP was listed as 0.0.0.0, which means none at all.

I called the ISP twice. Both time they said they could “see” my modem, and they tried to restart it on their end, but that did not seem to do anything at all, based on the constant status LEDs (see picture below). I got my service visit moved up from Dec 11th to Dec 2nd, but still that would mean a week without Internet – not so great when three people are relying on it for their work.

I rebooted the cable modem a couple times at least. Nothing changed.

Then I started some research on quickie alternatives. Ask a friend from work for a spare Cradlepoint air card? They’re already out on vacation. Get a Chinese-made unlocked hotspot with pre-purchased data? Seems fishy, and ultimately expensive. Verizon brand hotspot? We had a borrowed one. Very finicky. And no ethernet ports.

Raspberry Pi + DIY approach?

At one point in the evening, convinced I would have to wait days for for a visit from the cable guy, I rigged up a spare Raspberry Pi to act as a router between a mobile hotspot (a companion tablet to a Verizon phone) and my Linksys router. Why bother? Why not just use the hotspot directly? Mostly because it’s a pain in the rear to reprogram all those Internet of Things devices one has in ones home these days, notably the several Echo Dots, but as well, a wireless printer, a few laptops, Firesticks, tablets, etc. With this approach I keep the WiFi SSID as it was for all those devices. And, it sort of worked! At least I got one Echo Dot to work. I didn’t push my luck. This stuff consumes a lot of data, even when “idle.”

To be continued…

Linksys WRT1200AC status lights – when healthy!
Cable Modem tatus lights – when operating normally

But I am pretty good at troubleshooting. What I know that less experienced people may not is that all the testing I’ve done to that point was not ironclad proof of failure of the cable modem. I know the traditional advice of old is to hook up a laptop directly to the ethernet port and work with it that way. Furthermore the cable company support said that my status lights were reading normally. So, when I tested my work laptop? Are you kidding? That thing has so many problems when I switch between SSIDs due to some new security software – it loves to display the Globe in the system tray, and the only recourse is to reboot. That’s what I was seeing, but notice I said a quickie test? I did not have time to do that reboot and all that. And that work-issued VPN router? I don’t know how that thing really works either. Never having set it up that way I did not trust reading too much into its results (which was essentially an orange status light instead of the usual white).

So when I had more time in the evening, I hooked up a home laptop which I know should work. After a cable modem reboot in fact I did get an IP and could surf the Internet. That was a glimmer of hope. So I put my router back in place. Still it did not pick up an WAN IP address. Still reading 0.0.0.0 for its IP.

Then I put the laptop back, writing down the IP, subnet mask and default gateway. Then I put my router back, switched its WAN mode from DHCP to fixed IP, putting on the exact IP address the laptop had picked up, with correct subnet mask and default gateway. Still it was not working. When the router is not working the WAN status light is sort of orange-ish. It’s white (pictured above) when the WAN link is communicating.

I decided the fault should lie more with my router than anywhere else, and since it wasn’t working and no number of power cycles was changing that situation, I decided that a factory reset is the thing to try. The last thing I could try. I noted the exact name and passwords of my SSIDs, held the reset button for 15 seconds until the status lights flicked out, and let it start up. It went through a start-up process, which i saw after connecting to its default IP of 192.168.1.1. It was clear it was not seeing the cable modem at the point where it should, but it had some very specific advice to try: power off cable modem, wait two minutes, power it back on, and then it would try again. And that did work! Yeah!

What may have precipitated this

My local cable company was recently bought by a much bigger company. I know for a fact what my WAN IP used to be, and I see it has changed. They now draw from a giant pool of IPs – a /14 in CIDR notation – that’s 262,000 addresses – that belongs to the new owner. So I believe the problem occurred due to a poor implementation of the dhcp protocol within my router, or a poor interplay between my router’s DHCP client and the ISP’s DHCP server. But I can’t research that line of troubleshooting because the ISP’s DHCP policies would require a lot of time-consuming experimentation on my part to reverse engineer based on observed behaviour under different conditions. And I would need an open source DHCP client – but I have the Raspberry Pi running dnsmasq for that, so that end could gather all the needed client information.

Prior to this acquisition I would tend to keep the same WAN IP for years – that’s how stable it was.

Another approach

Very germane to this topic is the fact that my neighbor down the street experienced his own Internet outage the day after I did! His solution was to buy a better cable modem. I did not know you could do that – I thought they were proprietary. He also saw his router with the 0.0.0.0 WAN address. And his approach also worked. This makes me less sure my router was really at fault – maybe Altice screwed up their DHCP service for half a day.

Conclusion

Unusual for me, I’m going to write the conclusion before writing the tedious part which is the full explanation in the middle.

By the end of the day I got the Internet working. After isolating the problem to my home router, the Linksys WRT1200AC, and determining that any amount of power cycling was not clearing things up, a factory reset did the trick! The cable modem and my cable Internet service was fine all along.

References and related

How to turn your Raspberry Pi into a router which shares your hotspot with your home router.

The Linksys WRT1200AC is no longer sold. It looks like the newer version is the WRT1900AC – it even looks identical. It’s a good router. I know there are fancier solutions out there, but there are also worse ones as well, so I can only give my qualified endorsement: https://www.amazon.com/Linksys-AC1900-Source-Wireless-WRT1900AC/dp/B014MIBLSA/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=linksys+wrt1200ac&qid=1606519765&sr=8-1

DHCP and CIDR notation are both described in great detail in their respective Wikipedia articles.

Categories
DNS Perl Raspberry Pi

Domain Services: does Backorder work?

Intro

This is a memoir of my personal experience with trying to obtain a DNS domain that was registered by another person and about to expire. Plus some technical discussion of how whois on linux probably works.

The details

I’ve been watching a particular domain for years now. It’s always been registered at auction sites, and has changed hands at least once, maybe even twice. So i was excited this year when it was about to expire at the end of September. I kept checking via linux whois – figuring, or really more like hoping, that a direct query to the authoritative whois server would not tip off the owner if it were done outside of a web page. The linux command is whois -h whois.epik.com drjohnss.com (ok, that is not the real domain, just using it for the sake of preserving anonymitiy).

So about 10 days after it “expired” – at which point I believe it is very easy for the owner to still renew it – I wanted to increase my chances so I decided to make a bid for it, figuring, the owner would face either my offer or the prospect of getting nothing for the domain or shelling out for the renewal. So I offered $150 which is what it’s worth to me.

To my surprise I got a return email:

Hello John,
Thanks for the inquiry.
This seller will not sell for less than $10K. What is your budget?

Christina

Wow, right? Then I thought for a few minutes? I’ve seen this before – at work. There was this no-name domain which matched something the marketing folks were planning, so we made an offer through a third-party service. The response was to the effect, The seller is not interested in selling, but for $47,000 you could buy it. WTF. You can’t make this stuff up. I don’t have a lot of respect for domainers because frankly, almost all my interactions have been negative. Consider the evidence. At work I constantly get unsolicited offers for company_name.nz. The emails always come from different email addresses to avoid spam filters. That is cyber-squatting. Deplorable. I once got an unsolicited offer for a domain similar to one we owned (without the “s”). I checked it and found it wasn’t even registered! So that con artist was trying to take advantage of our naivete. Scum. Then a month ago I was offered some $ for any GoDaddy account which had been registered years ago and so had access to its API auction service, which you apparently cannot get any longer. Sounds like an invitation to violate the terms of service to me – another dodgy tactic.

So I thought about that statement and decided, that’s just a negotiating tactic to make me cower and think unless I raised my offer to, say, $1000, I wouldn’t stand a chance. I decided not to cave. I am the world’s worst negotiator but here I felt I had somewhat a position of strength given my tepid feelings about the domain and the fact that it had officially expired. My – somewhat flip – response:

Hi Christina,
Thanks for the response. Well, I am content to see it expire so the seller gets $0. I know it’s been doing nothing for years now. I am a private person with no commercial interest in development of the domain. My budget is $200.

Christina’s response:

Thanks John.
I hear you.
I advise you to get the refundable exclusive backorder.
Just buy it and then don’t check it.
Regards, Christina

So now this Christina lady sounds like she’s on my side seeing I wasn’t a big bucks buyer. At some point it’s a matter of trust. So I plunk down $200 for their backorder service and wait and don’t check.

Christina sends me this encouraging note:

John,
If you cancel the backorder, the fee is refunded.
And checking WHOIS is data we collect and which the registrant can see.
So, best to wait patiently.
Regards, Christina

She encourages me to be super patient and asks what my plans are for it. My response:

Hi Christina,
Bragging rights at family gatherings, etc.
Then I’ll think about more ambitious things like a private social media site, but I doubt I’ll go there.
Thanks,John

So how did it end up?

Not so good. I eventually broke down and did a single whois check after a couple weeks and found the domain had been renewed. Foiled once again, and out the $200 backorder fee.*

*Technically not out since Christina also said it was refundable. I’m just going to sit on it until next year, and the year after that, …

What is that business model?

I had plenty of days to think about it, and I was trying to square two irreconcilable facts. 1) The seller was going to hold out for big money for a worthless domain, thereby losing money. 2) Yet, presumably, the seller is overall making money. Hmm. So I came up with this hypothesis.

Although to an outsider like myself the seller’s approach is irrational, I have a hypothesis for a business model which could justify it.
My hypothesis for a business model that supports such behavior is that some domainers own hundreds or even thousands of seemingly low-value domains – a domain farm – which they patiently cultivate. In the Internet there is commonly seen the long-tail phenomenon. Chris Anderson described it in a book. So instead of following a normal distribution around the nominal value of an unlikely-sounding domain, the actual value distribution has a long tail on the upside. So, if one owns enough domains, although any one may never get the big offer, it only takes a few big ones a year to hit, make up for all the losers and create positive cash flow. After all a domain is really worth what a buyer is willing to pay, not what the algorithms judge them to be worth. Some people will be willing to pay big.

An industry insider I contacted demurred when asked for confirmation or denial of my hypothesis, but insteadpointed me to this link: https://domaingraduate.com/ . If I understand it correctly, chapter 7, The domain Name Aftermarket, addresses this scenario. But it says it basically doesn’t work the way that I hypothesized. And that plus the other chapters in total present a much, much more complex story. There are business models, of course, but, well, just read it for yourself. I don’t care. I still like my domain farm plus long valuation tail concept.

About whois on linux

I need to investigate further what goes on when a simple whois lookup is done. Like everything, there’s a lot of history and it’s not so straightforward. This somewhat outdated article seems to cover it really well: https://securitytrails.com/blog/whois-lookup . I’m still digesting it myself. I’ve done a trace on port 43 for a whois lookup of drjohnstechtalk.com and see somewhat confounding results – it’s talking to two whois servers, a Verisign one (whois.verisign.com or similar), which provides some minimal information, and one which refuses to provide any information – whois.godaddy.com (GoDaddy is the registrar for this domain). My tenuous conclusion is that whois to Verisign does a static lookup and Verisign has a database which covers all of the .com domains with basic information. More detailed information can be provided by the actual registrar for that domain. But GoDaddy refuses to do that. However, it appears other registrars do accept these requests for details! In particular the registrars which are used by domainers to park their domains. Hence it is entirely possible, even from packet analysis, that a registrar gets tipped off by a linux command-line whois lookup (and therefore could provide metrics back to the registrant about these occurrences.)

Double however

I did still more research on whois, i.e., RTFM type stuff. It looks like there are switches which should turn off lookups on other server, like -r or -R, but when you try them they don’t actually work. But, I enabled verbose mode which shows you the whois servers being queried – no need to do a laborious packet trace – and I discovered that if you run the command this way:

$ whois –verbose -h whois.verisign-grs.com <domain_name>

then the query stays with Verisign’s whois server and there is no data leakage or data sharing with the actual registrar! So, mission accomplished. Note that the Verisign whois server probably only covers .com and .net gTLDs. For others like .io, .us, .info you have to figure out the principal whois server for yourself. Or ask for help in the comments section.

drjwhois makes it easier

I decided to write my own wrapper for whois to make this easier for anyone going down this path. Just bear in mind its limited applicability. It’s aimed at people interested in a domain, probably one on the after market, where they want to know if it’s about to expire or has actually expired, without tipping off the seller. As I said I call it drjwhois.

#!/usr/bin/perl
# DrJ's wrapper for whois - prevents data leakage
# Drj 11/20
$DEBUG = 0;
$domain = lc $ARGV[0];
# These are just the TLDs I consider the most important. Obviously there are thousands. Many do not have a resale market.
#to find the whois server just run whois --verbose
$BIZ = "whois.nic.biz";
$BR = "whois.registro.br";
$CA = "whois.cira.ca";
$CO = "whois.nic.io";
$DE = "whois.denic.de"; # de but whois server does not reveal anything! Must use their web site.
$ENOM = "whois.enom.com"; # biz
$IE = "whois.iedr.ie";
$IN = "whois.registry.in";
$INFO = "whois.afilias.net";
$IO = "whois.nic.io";
$ME = "whois.nic.me";
$ORG = "whois.pir.org";
$RU = "whois.tcinet.ru";
$US = "whois.nic.us";
$Verisign = "whois.verisign-grs.com"; # com, net, edu
%TLDs = ('biz',$BIZ,'br',$BR,'ca',$CA,'com',$Verisign,'me',$ME,'net',$Verisign,'edu',$Verisign,'ie',$IE,'io',$IO,'co',$CO,
'in',$IN,'info',$INFO,'org',$ORG,'ru',$RU,'tv',$ENOM,'us',$US);
if ($DEBUG) {
  foreach $key (keys %TLDs) {
    print $key . " " . $TLDs{"$key"} . "\n";
  }
}
$_ = $domain;
($tld) = /.([^.]+)$/;
print qq(Domain:\t\t$domain
TLD:\t\t$tld
WHOIS server:\t$TLDs{$tld}\n\n);
#$result = whois -h $TLDs{$tld} $domain;
#print $result;
unless ($TLDs{$tld}) {
  print "drjwhois has no information about this TLD. Instead use whois $domain\n";
  exit;
}
open(WHOIS,"whois -h $TLDs{$tld} $domain|") || die "Cannot launch whois -h $TLDs{$tld} $domain!!\n";
while(<WHOIS>) {
  if (/(whois|expir|paid|renewal)/i) {
    print ;
    $exists = 1;
  }
}
print "Domain $domain appears to be unregistered!\n" unless $exists;
print qq(\n\ndrjwhois is designed to only show information about the expiration
date of a domain, and if it has become unregistered, all without
leaking the query to aftermarket sellers such as Sedo, Epik, enom, etc.
If you want full information just use whois $domain
);

Example usage

$ drjwhois johnstechtalk.com

Domain: johnstechtalk.com
TLD:    com
WHOIS server: whois.verisign-grs.com

Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.godaddy.com
Registry Expiry Date: 2021-04-23T00:54:17Z
NOTICE: The expiration date displayed in this record is the date the
currently set to expire. This date does not necessarily reflect the expiration
view the registrar's reported date of expiration for this registration.

drjwhois is designed to only show information about the expiration
date of a domain, and if it has become unregistered, all without
leaking the query to aftermarket sellers such as Sedo, Epik, enom, etc.
If you want full information just use whois johnstechtalk.com

Anyway, I say the write-up is outdated because it’s a lot harder than it was a few years ago to get the registrant information. ICANN was chastened I believe by GDPR (data privacy) concerns and so most of the registrant’s personal details has been yanked, generally speaking. But there are left a few valuable nuggets of information.

How about all those nice web interfaces to whois?

I would personally avoid all the web interfaces registrars offer to whois – they seem to be run by the sales and marketing departments without exception. They almost guarantee data sharing with the registrant in addition to selling you services you don’t want.

Conclusion

My guess is that backorders rarely work out. Mine certainly didn’t. But if you like gambling it has a certain thrill to it since you never know…

If you want to play with the big boys and girls and make some money from buying and selling domains, my impression is that Epik is an honest broker, and that’s important to have when so many are not above coloring outside the lines in this business.

linux whois does indeed provide a way to avoid having your interest in a domain leak out to the owner. Use whois -h whois.verisign-grs.com <domain_name> and you are not giving yourself away.

References and related

An old blog post of mine which describes writing a program to GoDaddy’s api for buying a domain as soon as it becomes available.

Whois – what goes on behind the scenes during a whois lookup: https://securitytrails.com/blog/whois-lookup

Best resource I am aware of which covers the strange virtual world of buying and selling domains for a living.: https://domaingraduate.com/

If you’re dying to try out whois on linux but don’t have access to linux, you could either get a Raspberry Pi, though there is some set up and cost involved there, or install Cygwin on Windows 10, though there is some setup involved in getting the package setup, but at least there’s no cost.

On Centos linux, Raspbian (used by Raspberry Pi) and Cygwin, whois is its own package. On my Centos 8 server it is whois-5.5.1-2.

Categories
Admin Linux Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi Recovery Mode or interrupting the boot process

Intro
If you installed Raspbian from the NOOBS distribution as I do, then you may occasionally “blow up” your installation as I just have! You have an out, sort of, short of re-imaging the disk, though about with the same impact.

To interrupt the boot process and enter recovery mode, attach a USB keyboard and repeatedly hit the Shift key. You should come to the NOOBS OS install selection screen. Just re-install Rasbian again…

Symptoms
When I powered up, I got the initial multi-color screen. Then a two-line text message popped up – too quickly to be read, then a grayish screen, then it split into a lower and upper part, then both halves faded away and there it stayed… At that point it was not responsive to any keyboard inputs or mouse clicks.

Conclusion
While doing my advanced slide show and rotating display project, I somehow managed to blow up my OS. finding the way to interrupt the boot-up was not so easy so I am amplifying the answer that worked for me on the Internet: repeatedly hit the Shift key during the boot, until you see the NOOBS image selector screen.

Categories
Linux Network Technologies Raspberry Pi

OLD: Raspberry Pi photo frame using your pictures on your Google Drive

Intro

This posting is messed up. I’ll have to re-post. Working on it… Try this post instead.

All my spouse’s digital photo frames are either broken or nearly broken – probably she got them from garage sales. Regardless, they spend 99% of the the time black. Now, since I had bought that Raspberry Pi PiDisplay awhile back, and it is underutilized, and I know a thing or two about linux, I felt I could create a custom photo frame with things I already have lying around – a Raspberry Pi 3, a PiDisplay, and my personal Google Drive. We make a point to copy all our cameras’ pictures onto the Google Drive, which we do the old-fashioned, by-hand way. After 17 years of digital photos we have about 40,000 of them, over 200 GB.

So I also felt obliged to create features you will never have in a commercial product, to make the effort worthwhile. I thought, what about randomly picking a few for display from amongst all the pictures, displaying that subset for a few days, and then moving on to a new randomly selected sample of images, etc? That should produce a nice review of all of them over time, eventually. You need an approach like that because you will never get to the end if you just try to display 40000 images in order!

The scripts
Here is the master file which I call master.sh.

#!/bin/sh
# DrJ 8/2019
# call this from cron once a day to refesh random slideshow once a day
RANFILE="random.list"
NUMFOLDERS=20
DISPLAYFOLDER="/home/pi/Pictures"
DISPLAYFOLDERTMP="/home/pi/Picturestmp"
SLEEPINTERVAL=3
DEBUG=1
STARTFOLDER="MaryDocs/Pictures and videos"
 
echo "Starting master process at "`date`
 
rm -rf $DISPLAYFOLDERTMP
mkdir $DISPLAYFOLDERTMP
 
#listing of all Google drive files starting from the picture root
if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo Listing all files from Google drive; fi
rclone ls remote:"$STARTFOLDER" &gt; files
 
# filter down to only jpegs, lose the docs folders
if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo Picking out the JPEGs; fi
egrep '\.[jJ][pP][eE]?[gG]
 
Needless to say, but I'd better say it, the STARTFOLDER in this script is particular to my own Google drive. Customize it as appropriate for your situation.
 
Then qiv (quick image viewer) is called with a bunch of arguments and some trickery to ensure proper display of files with spaces in the filenames (an anathema for Linux but my spouse doesn't know that so I gotta deal with it). I call this script qiv.sh.
#!/bin/sh
# -f : full-screen; -R : disable deletion; -s : slideshow; -d : delay ; -i : status-bar;
# -m : zoom; [-r : ranomdize]
# this doesn't handle filenames with spaces:
##cd /media; qiv -f -R -s -d 5 -i -m `find /media -regex ".+\.jpe?g$"`
# this one does:
export DISPLAY=:0
if [ "$1" = "l" ]; then
# print out proposed filenames
  find . -regex ".+\.[jJ][pP][eE]?[gG]$"
else
# args: f fullscreen d delay s slideshow l autorotate R readonly I statusbar
# i nostatusbar m maxspect
  find . -regex ".+\.[jJ][pP][eE]?[gG]$" -print0|xargs -0 qiv -fRsmil -d 5
fi

Here is the perl script which generates the random numbers and associates them to the file listing we’ve just made with rclone, random-files.pl.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use Getopt::Std;
my %opt=();
getopts("df:j:r:",\%opt);
$nofolders = $opt{f} ? $opt{f} : 20;
$DEBUG = $opt{d} ? 1 : 0;
$jpegs = $opt{j} ? $opt{j} : "jpegs.list";
$ranpicfile = $opt{r} ? $opt{r} : "jpegs-random.list";
print "d,f,j,r: $opt{d}, $opt{f}, $opt{j}, $opt{r}\n" if $DEBUG;
open(JPEGS,$jpegs) || die "Cannot open jpegs listing file $jpegs!!\n";
@jpegs = ;
# remove newline character
$nopics = chomp @jpegs;
open(RAN,"&gt; $ranpicfile") || die "Cannot open random picture file $ranpicfile!!\n";
for($i=0;$i&lt;$nofolders;$i++) {
  $t = int(rand($nopics-2));
  print "random number is: $t\n" if $DEBUG;
  ($dateTime) = $jpegs[$t] =~ /(\d{8}_\d{6})/;
  if ($dateTime) {
    print "dateTime\n" if $DEBUG;
  }
  $priorPic = $jpegs[$t-2];
  $Pic = $jpegs[$t];
  $postPic = $jpegs[$t+2];
  print RAN qq($priorPic
$Pic
$postPic
);
}
close(RAN);

Note that to display 60 pictures only 20 random numbers are used, and then the picture 2 prior and the picture two after the one selected by the random number are also displayed. This helps to provide, hopefully, some context to what is being shown without showing all those duplicate pictures that everyone takes nowadays.

There is an attempt to favor recently uploaded pictures but I really haven’t perfected that part of master.sh, it’s more of a thought at this point.

My crontab entries take care of starting a slideshow upon first boot as well as a daily pick of 60 new random pictures!

@reboot sleep 25; cd ~ ; ./m2.pl &gt;&gt; ./m2.log 2&gt;&amp;1
24 16 * * * ./master.sh &gt;&gt; ./master.log 2&gt;&amp;1

Use crontab -e to edit your crontab file.

qiv – an easy install
To install qiv

$ sudo apt-get install qiv

Rclone shown in some detail
The real magic is tapping into the Google Drive, which is done with rclone. There are older packages but they are awful by comparison so don’t waste your time on any other package. More recent rclone packages offer more options than what is shown here, but work basically the same way.

$ sudo apt-get install rclone
$ rclone config

2019/08/05 20:22:42 NOTICE: Config file "/home/pi/.config/rclone/rclone.conf" not found - using defaults
No remotes found - make a new one
n) New remote
s) Set configuration password
q) Quit config
n/s/q&gt; n
name&gt; remote
Type of storage to configure.
Choose a number from below, or type in your own value
 1 / Amazon Drive
   \ "amazon cloud drive"
 2 / Amazon S3 (also Dreamhost, Ceph, Minio)
   \ "s3"
 3 / Backblaze B2
   \ "b2"
 4 / Dropbox
   \ "dropbox"
 5 / Encrypt/Decrypt a remote
   \ "crypt"
 6 / Google Cloud Storage (this is not Google Drive)
   \ "google cloud storage"
 7 / Google Drive
   \ "drive"
 8 / Hubic
   \ "hubic"
 9 / Local Disk
   \ "local"
10 / Microsoft OneDrive
   \ "onedrive"
11 / Openstack Swift (Rackspace Cloud Files, Memset Memstore, OVH)
   \ "swift"
12 / Yandex Disk
   \ "yandex" 
Storage&gt;7
 
Google Application Client Id
Leave blank normally.
Enter a string value. Press Enter for the default ("").
client_id&gt;
Google Application Client Secret
Leave blank normally.
Enter a string value. Press Enter for the default ("").
client_secret&gt;
Remote config
Use auto config?
 * Say Y if not sure
 * Say N if you are working on a remote or headless machine or Y didn't work
y) Yes
n) No
y/n&gt; N
If your browser doesn't open automatically go to the following link: https://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/auth?client_id=202264815644.apps.googleusercontent.com&amp;redirect_uri=urn%3Aietf%3Awg%3Aoauth%3A2.0%3Aoob&amp;response_type=code&amp;scope=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.googleapis.com%2Fauth%2Fdrive&amp;state=07ab6a457efc9384772f919dca93375
Log in and authorize rclone for access

You sign in to your Google account with a regular browser.

After sign-in you see:

rclone wants to access your Google Account
<your_account>@gmail.com
This will allow rclone
to:

See, edit, create, and delete all of your Google Drive files

Make sure you trust rclone

After clicking Allow you get:

Please copy this code, switch to your application and paste it there:
 
Enter verification code&gt;4/nQEXJZOTdP_asMs6UQZ5ucs6ecvoiLPelQbhI76rnuj4sFjptxbjm7w
--------------------
[remote]
client_id =
client_secret =
token = {"access_token":"ya29.Il-KB3eniEpkdUGhwdi8XyZyfBFIF2ahRVQtrr7kR-E2lIExSh3C1j-PAB-JZucL1j9D801Wbh2_OEDHthV2jk_MsrKCMiLSibX7oa_YtFxts-V9CxRRUirF1_kPHi5u_Q","token_type":"Bearer","refresh_token":"1/MQP8jevISJL1iEXH9gaNc7LIsABC-92TpmqwtRJ3zV8","expiry":"2019-09-21T08:34:19.251821011-04:00"}
--------------------
y) Yes this is OK
e) Edit this remote
d) Delete this remote
y/e/d&gt; y
Current remotes:
 
Name                 Type
====                 ====
remote               drive
 
e) Edit existing remote
n) New remote
d) Delete remote
s) Set configuration password
q) Quit config
e/n/d/r/s/q&gt;q

Note you can very well keep the root folder id blank. In my case we store all our pictures in one top-level folder and the nested folders get pretty deep, plus there’s a busload of other things on the drive, so I wanted to give rclone the best possible shot at running well. Still, listing our 40,000+ pictures takes 90 seconds or so.

Goofed up your config of rclone? No worries. Remove .config/rclone and start over.

Don’t forget to make all these scripts executable (chmod +x <script_name>:)or you will end up seeing messages like this:

./master.sh
-bash: ./master.sh: Permission denied

Some noteworthy rclone commands
rclone ls remote: – lists all files, going recursively, no problem with MORE
rclone lsd remote: lists directories in top level of drive
rclone copy remote:”MaryDocs/Pictures and videos/Shutterfly books collection of photos/JJH birth photos/img2165.jpg” .   – copies picture to current directory (does not create directory hierarchy)

Do a complete directory listing, capture the results in a file and see how long it took:
$ time rclone ls remote: > lsf-complete

real    1m12.201s
user    0m15.270s
sys     0m1.816s

My initial thought was to do a remote mount of the Google Drive onto a Raspberry Pi mount point, but it’s just so slow that it really provides no advantage to do it that way.

Some encountered issues
Well, I blew up on crontab, which in all my years working with linux/unix I’ve never done before. But I managed to fix it.

Prior to discovering rclone I made the mistake of using gdrivefs to create a mounted Google Drive – sounds great in principle, right? What a disaster. The files’ binary data were not correctly preserved when accessed through the mount though the size was! I have also never encountered a mounting software that corrupted files, but this piece of garbage does. One way to detect corruption in a binary file is to do a cksum (or md5sum, just be consistent and use one or the other) of source file and destination version of same file. The result should be the same number.

Imagined but avoided issue: JPEG orientation
I had prepared a whole python program to orient my pictures correctly, but lo and behold I “discovered” that the -l switch in qiv does that for you! So I actually ripped that whole unnecessary step out.

Conclusion
Re-purposing equipment I had lying around: Raspberry Pi 3, Pi Display, and 40,000 JPEG images on Google Drive, I put together a novel photoframe slideshow which randomly displays a different set of 60 pictures each day. It’s a nice way for us to be exposed to our collection of 17+ years of digital photos.

The qiv really is a quick image viewer, i.e., the slideshow runs clean, like a real one.

Long Todo list

  • Improve selection of recent pictures if we’ve just uploaded a bunch of pictures from our smartphones.
  • Hey, how about also showing some of those short videos we also shot with our camera phones and uploaded to Google Drive? And while we’re at it, re-purposing those cheap USB speakers I bought for RetroPi gaming to get the sound, or play a soundtrack!?
  • I realize that although the selection of the 20 anchor pictures is initially random, when they plus the 40 additional photos are presented for display additional order is imposed by the shell’s expansion of the regex and this has a tendency to make the pictures more chronologically organized than they would be by chance.

References and related
PiDisplay

RetroPi, the gaming emulation project for which I bought economical USB speakers.

The rclone home page.

A detailed write-up on using pipresents program where we had a Raspberry Pi drive a mixed media display 9pictures and videos) for a kiosk.

files |awk '{$1=""; print substr($0,2)}'|grep -i -v /docs/ &gt; jpegs.list # throw NUMFOLDERS or so random numbers for picture selection, select triplets of photos by putting # names into a file if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo Generate random filename triplets; fi ./random-files.pl -f $NUMFOLDERS -j jpegs.list -r $RANFILE # copy over these 60 jpegs if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo Copy over these random files; fi cat $RANFILE|while read line; do rclone copy remote:"${STARTFOLDER}/$line" $DISPLAYFOLDERTMP sleep $SLEEPINTERVAL done # kill any qiv slideshow if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo Killing old qiv slideshow; fi pkill -9 -f qiv # remove old pics if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo Removing old pictures; fi rm -rf $DISPLAYFOLDER mv $DISPLAYFOLDERTMP $DISPLAYFOLDER #run looping qiv slideshow on these pictures if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo Start qiv slideshow in background; fi cd $DISPLAYFOLDER ; nohup ~/qiv.sh &amp; if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo "And now it is "`date`; fi

Needless to say, but I’d better say it, the STARTFOLDER in this script is particular to my own Google drive. Customize it as appropriate for your situation.

Then qiv (quick image viewer) is called with a bunch of arguments and some trickery to ensure proper display of files with spaces in the filenames (an anathema for Linux but my spouse doesn’t know that so I gotta deal with it). I call this script qiv.sh.



Here is the perl script which generates the random numbers and associates them to the file listing we’ve just made with rclone, random-files.pl.




Note that to display 60 pictures only 20 random numbers are used, and then the picture 2 prior and the picture two after the one selected by the random number are also displayed. This helps to provide, hopefully, some context to what is being shown without showing all those duplicate pictures that everyone takes nowadays.


There is an attempt to favor recently uploaded pictures but I really haven’t perfected that part of master.sh, it’s more of a thought at this point.


My crontab entries take care of starting a slideshow upon first boot as well as a daily pick of 60 new random pictures!




Use crontab -e to edit your crontab file.


qiv – an easy install

To install qiv


$ sudo apt-get install qiv


Rclone shown in some detail

The real magic is tapping into the Google Drive, which is done with rclone. There are older packages but they are awful by comparison so don’t waste your time on any other package.


$ sudo apt-get install rclone

$ rclone config




You sign in to your Google account with a regular browser.


After sign-in you see:


rclone wants to access your Google Account

<your_account>@gmail.com

This will allow rclone

to:


See, edit, create, and delete all of your Google Drive files


Make sure you trust rclone


After clicking Allow you get:




Note you can very well keep the root folder id blank. In my case we store all our pictures in one top-level folder and the nested folders get pretty deep, plus there’s a busload of other things on the drive, so I wanted to give rclone the best possible shot at running well. Still, listing our 40,000+ pictures takes 90 seconds or so.


Goofed up your config of rclone? No worries. Remove .config/rclone and start over.


Don’t forget to make all these scripts executable (chmod +x <script_name>:)or you will end up seeing messages like this:




Some noteworthy rclone commands

rclone ls remote: – lists all files, going recursively, no problem with MORE

rclone lsd remote: lists directories in top level of drive

rclone copy remote:”MaryDocs/Pictures and videos/Shutterfly books collection of photos/JJH birth photos/img2165.jpg” . : copies picture to current directory (does not create directory hierarchy)


Do a complete directory listing, capture the results in a file and see how long it took:

$ time rclone ls remote: > lsf-complete




My initial thought was to do a remote mount of the Google Drive onto a Raspberry Pi mount point, but it’s just so slow that it really provides no advantage to do it that way.


Some encountered issues

Well, I blew up on crontab, which in all my years working with linux/unix I’ve never done before. But I managed to fix it.


Prior to discovering rclone I made the mistake of using gdrivefs to create a mounted Google Drive – sounds great in principle, right? What a disaster. The files’ binary data were not correctly preserved when accessed through the mount though the size was! I have also never encountered a mounting software that corrupted files, but this piece of garbage does. One way to detect corruption in a binary file is to do a cksum (or md5sum, just be consistent and use one or the other) of source file and destination version of same file. The result should be the same number.



Imagined but avoided issue: JPEG orientation

I had prepared a whole python program to orient my pictures correctly, but lo and behold I “discovered” that the -l switch in qiv does that for you! So I actually ripped that whole unnecessary step out.


Conclusion

Re-purposing equipment I had lying around: Raspberry Pi 3, Pi Display, and 40,000 JPEG images on Google Drive, I put together a novel photoframe slideshow which randomly displays a different set of 60 pictures each day. It’s a nice way for us to be exposed to our collection of 17+ years of digital photos.


The qiv really is a quick image viewer, i.e., the slideshow runs clean, like a real one.


Long Todo list


    

  • Improve selection of recent pictures if we’ve just uploaded a bunch of pictures from our smartphones.
    • 

  • Hey, how about also showing some of those short videos we also shot with our camera phones and uploaded to Google Drive? And while we’re at it, re-purposing those cheap USB speakers I bought for RetroPi gaming to get the sound, or play a soundtrack!?
    • 

  • I realize that although the selection of the 20 anchor pictures is initially random, when they plus the 40 additional photos are presented for display additional order is imposed by the shell’s expansion of the regex and this has a tendency to make the pictures more chronologically organized than they would be by chance.
    • 



References and related

PiDisplay


RetroPi, the gaming emulation project for which I bought economical USB speakers.


The rclone home page.


A detailed write-up on using pipresents program where we had a Raspberry Pi drive a mixed media display 9pictures and videos) for a kiosk.



files |awk '{$1=""; print substr($0,2)}'|grep -i -v /docs/ &gt; jpegs.list # throw NUMFOLDERS or so random numbers for picture selection, select triplets of photos by putting # names into a file if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo Generate random filename triplets; fi ./random-files.pl -f $NUMFOLDERS -j jpegs.list -r $RANFILE # copy over these 60 jpegs if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo Copy over these random files; fi cat $RANFILE|while read line; do rclone copy remote:"${STARTFOLDER}/$line" $DISPLAYFOLDERTMP sleep $SLEEPINTERVAL done # rotate pics as needed if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo Rotate the pics which need it; fi cd $DISPLAYFOLDERTMP; ~/rotate-as-needed.sh cd ~ # kill any qiv slideshow if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo Killing old qiv and fbi slideshow; fi pkill -9 -f qiv sudo pkill -9 -f fbi pkill -9 -f m2.pl # remove old pics if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo Removing old pictures; fi rm -rf $DISPLAYFOLDER mv $DISPLAYFOLDERTMP $DISPLAYFOLDER #run looping fbi slideshow on these pictures if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo Start fbi slideshow in background; fi cd $DISPLAYFOLDER ; nohup ~/m2.pl &gt;&gt; ~/m2.log 2&gt;&amp;1 &amp; if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo "And now it is "`date`; fi



Needless to say, but I’d better say it, the STARTFOLDER in this script is particular to my own Google drive. Customize it as appropriate for your situation.


Then qiv (quick image viewer) is called with a bunch of arguments and some trickery to ensure proper display of files with spaces in the filenames (an anathema for Linux but my spouse doesn’t know that so I gotta deal with it). I call this script qiv.sh.




Here is the perl script which generates the random numbers and associates them to the file listing we’ve just made with rclone, random-files.pl.




Note that to display 60 pictures only 20 random numbers are used, and then the picture 2 prior and the picture two after the one selected by the random number are also displayed. This helps to provide, hopefully, some context to what is being shown without showing all those duplicate pictures that everyone takes nowadays.


There is an attempt to favor recently uploaded pictures but I really haven’t perfected that part of master.sh, it’s more of a thought at this point.


My crontab entries take care of starting a slideshow upon first boot as well as a daily pick of 60 new random pictures!




Use crontab -e to edit your crontab file.


qiv – an easy install

To install qiv


$ sudo apt-get install qiv


Rclone shown in some detail

The real magic is tapping into the Google Drive, which is done with rclone. There are older packages but they are awful by comparison so don’t waste your time on any other package. More recent rclone packages offer more options than what is shown here, but work basically the same way.


$ sudo apt-get install rclone

$ rclone config




You sign in to your Google account with a regular browser.


After sign-in you see:


rclone wants to access your Google Account

<your_account>@gmail.com

This will allow rclone

to:


See, edit, create, and delete all of your Google Drive files


Make sure you trust rclone


After clicking Allow you get:




Note you can very well keep the root folder id blank. In my case we store all our pictures in one top-level folder and the nested folders get pretty deep, plus there’s a busload of other things on the drive, so I wanted to give rclone the best possible shot at running well. Still, listing our 40,000+ pictures takes 90 seconds or so.


Goofed up your config of rclone? No worries. Remove .config/rclone and start over.


Don’t forget to make all these scripts executable (chmod +x <script_name>:)or you will end up seeing messages like this:




Some noteworthy rclone commands

rclone ls remote: – lists all files, going recursively, no problem with MORE

rclone lsd remote: lists directories in top level of drive

rclone copy remote:”MaryDocs/Pictures and videos/Shutterfly books collection of photos/JJH birth photos/img2165.jpg” .   – copies picture to current directory (does not create directory hierarchy)


Do a complete directory listing, capture the results in a file and see how long it took:

$ time rclone ls remote: > lsf-complete




My initial thought was to do a remote mount of the Google Drive onto a Raspberry Pi mount point, but it’s just so slow that it really provides no advantage to do it that way.


Some encountered issues

Well, I blew up on crontab, which in all my years working with linux/unix I’ve never done before. But I managed to fix it.


Prior to discovering rclone I made the mistake of using gdrivefs to create a mounted Google Drive – sounds great in principle, right? What a disaster. The files’ binary data were not correctly preserved when accessed through the mount though the size was! I have also never encountered a mounting software that corrupted files, but this piece of garbage does. One way to detect corruption in a binary file is to do a cksum (or md5sum, just be consistent and use one or the other) of source file and destination version of same file. The result should be the same number.



Imagined but avoided issue: JPEG orientation

I had prepared a whole python program to orient my pictures correctly, but lo and behold I “discovered” that the -l switch in qiv does that for you! So I actually ripped that whole unnecessary step out.


Conclusion

Re-purposing equipment I had lying around: Raspberry Pi 3, Pi Display, and 40,000 JPEG images on Google Drive, I put together a novel photoframe slideshow which randomly displays a different set of 60 pictures each day. It’s a nice way for us to be exposed to our collection of 17+ years of digital photos.


The qiv really is a quick image viewer, i.e., the slideshow runs clean, like a real one.


Long Todo list


    

  • Improve selection of recent pictures if we’ve just uploaded a bunch of pictures from our smartphones.
    • 

  • Hey, how about also showing some of those short videos we also shot with our camera phones and uploaded to Google Drive? And while we’re at it, re-purposing those cheap USB speakers I bought for RetroPi gaming to get the sound, or play a soundtrack!?
    • 

  • I realize that although the selection of the 20 anchor pictures is initially random, when they plus the 40 additional photos are presented for display additional order is imposed by the shell’s expansion of the regex and this has a tendency to make the pictures more chronologically organized than they would be by chance.
    • 



References and related

PiDisplay


RetroPi, the gaming emulation project for which I bought economical USB speakers.


The rclone home page.


A detailed write-up on using pipresents program where we had a Raspberry Pi drive a mixed media display 9pictures and videos) for a kiosk.




Needless to say, but I’d better say it, the STARTFOLDER in this script is particular to my own Google drive. Customize it as appropriate for your situation.


Then qiv (quick image viewer) is called with a bunch of arguments and some trickery to ensure proper display of files with spaces in the filenames (an anathema for Linux but my spouse doesn’t know that so I gotta deal with it). I call this script qiv.sh.




Here is the perl script which generates the random numbers and associates them to the file listing we’ve just made with rclone, random-files.pl.




Note that to display 60 pictures only 20 random numbers are used, and then the picture 2 prior and the picture two after the one selected by the random number are also displayed. This helps to provide, hopefully, some context to what is being shown without showing all those duplicate pictures that everyone takes nowadays.


There is an attempt to favor recently uploaded pictures but I really haven’t perfected that part of master.sh, it’s more of a thought at this point.


My crontab entries take care of starting a slideshow upon first boot as well as a daily pick of 60 new random pictures!




Use crontab -e to edit your crontab file.


qiv – an easy install

To install qiv


$ sudo apt-get install qiv


Rclone shown in some detail

The real magic is tapping into the Google Drive, which is done with rclone. There are older packages but they are awful by comparison so don’t waste your time on any other package.


$ sudo apt-get install rclone

$ rclone config




You sign in to your Google account with a regular browser.


After sign-in you see:


rclone wants to access your Google Account

<your_account>@gmail.com

This will allow rclone

to:


See, edit, create, and delete all of your Google Drive files


Make sure you trust rclone


After clicking Allow you get:




Note you can very well keep the root folder id blank. In my case we store all our pictures in one top-level folder and the nested folders get pretty deep, plus there’s a busload of other things on the drive, so I wanted to give rclone the best possible shot at running well. Still, listing our 40,000+ pictures takes 90 seconds or so.


Goofed up your config of rclone? No worries. Remove .config/rclone and start over.


Don’t forget to make all these scripts executable (chmod +x <script_name>:)or you will end up seeing messages like this:




Some noteworthy rclone commands

rclone ls remote: – lists all files, going recursively, no problem with MORE

rclone lsd remote: lists directories in top level of drive

rclone copy remote:”MaryDocs/Pictures and videos/Shutterfly books collection of photos/JJH birth photos/img2165.jpg” . : copies picture to current directory (does not create directory hierarchy)


Do a complete directory listing, capture the results in a file and see how long it took:

$ time rclone ls remote: > lsf-complete




My initial thought was to do a remote mount of the Google Drive onto a Raspberry Pi mount point, but it’s just so slow that it really provides no advantage to do it that way.


Some encountered issues

Well, I blew up on crontab, which in all my years working with linux/unix I’ve never done before. But I managed to fix it.


Prior to discovering rclone I made the mistake of using gdrivefs to create a mounted Google Drive – sounds great in principle, right? What a disaster. The files’ binary data were not correctly preserved when accessed through the mount though the size was! I have also never encountered a mounting software that corrupted files, but this piece of garbage does. One way to detect corruption in a binary file is to do a cksum (or md5sum, just be consistent and use one or the other) of source file and destination version of same file. The result should be the same number.



Imagined but avoided issue: JPEG orientation

I had prepared a whole python program to orient my pictures correctly, but lo and behold I “discovered” that the -l switch in qiv does that for you! So I actually ripped that whole unnecessary step out.


Conclusion

Re-purposing equipment I had lying around: Raspberry Pi 3, Pi Display, and 40,000 JPEG images on Google Drive, I put together a novel photoframe slideshow which randomly displays a different set of 60 pictures each day. It’s a nice way for us to be exposed to our collection of 17+ years of digital photos.


The qiv really is a quick image viewer, i.e., the slideshow runs clean, like a real one.


Long Todo list


    

  • Improve selection of recent pictures if we’ve just uploaded a bunch of pictures from our smartphones.
    • 

  • Hey, how about also showing some of those short videos we also shot with our camera phones and uploaded to Google Drive? And while we’re at it, re-purposing those cheap USB speakers I bought for RetroPi gaming to get the sound, or play a soundtrack!?
    • 

  • I realize that although the selection of the 20 anchor pictures is initially random, when they plus the 40 additional photos are presented for display additional order is imposed by the shell’s expansion of the regex and this has a tendency to make the pictures more chronologically organized than they would be by chance.
    • 



References and related

PiDisplay


RetroPi, the gaming emulation project for which I bought economical USB speakers.


The rclone home page.


A detailed write-up on using pipresents program where we had a Raspberry Pi drive a mixed media display 9pictures and videos) for a kiosk.

files |awk ‘{$1=””; print substr($0,2)}’|grep -i -v /docs/ > jpegs.list


# throw NUMFOLDERS or so random numbers for picture selection, select triplets of photos by putting

# names into a file

if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo Generate random filename triplets; fi

./random-files.pl -f $NUMFOLDERS -j jpegs.list -r $RANFILE


# copy over these 60 jpegs

if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo Copy over these random files; fi

cat $RANFILE|while read line; do

rclone copy remote:”${STARTFOLDER}/$line” $DISPLAYFOLDERTMP

sleep $SLEEPINTERVAL

done


# rotate pics as needed

if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo Rotate the pics which need it; fi

cd $DISPLAYFOLDERTMP; ~/rotate-as-needed.sh

cd ~


# kill any qiv slideshow

if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo Killing old qiv and fbi slideshow; fi

pkill -9 -f qiv

sudo pkill -9 -f fbi

pkill -9 -f m2.pl


# remove old pics

if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo Removing old pictures; fi

rm -rf $DISPLAYFOLDER


mv $DISPLAYFOLDERTMP $DISPLAYFOLDER


#run looping fbi slideshow on these pictures

if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo Start fbi slideshow in background; fi

cd $DISPLAYFOLDER ; nohup ~/m2.pl >> ~/m2.log 2>&1 &


if [ $DEBUG -eq 1 ]; then echo “And now it is “`date`; fi


Needless to say, but I’d better say it, the STARTFOLDER in this script is particular to my own Google drive. Customize it as appropriate for your situation.


Then qiv (quick image viewer) is called with a bunch of arguments and some trickery to ensure proper display of files with spaces in the filenames (an anathema for Linux but my spouse doesn’t know that so I gotta deal with it). I call this script qiv.sh.




Here is the perl script which generates the random numbers and associates them to the file listing we’ve just made with rclone, random-files.pl.




Note that to display 60 pictures only 20 random numbers are used, and then the picture 2 prior and the picture two after the one selected by the random number are also displayed. This helps to provide, hopefully, some context to what is being shown without showing all those duplicate pictures that everyone takes nowadays.


There is an attempt to favor recently uploaded pictures but I really haven’t perfected that part of master.sh, it’s more of a thought at this point.


My crontab entries take care of starting a slideshow upon first boot as well as a daily pick of 60 new random pictures!




Use crontab -e to edit your crontab file.


qiv – an easy install

To install qiv


$ sudo apt-get install qiv


Rclone shown in some detail

The real magic is tapping into the Google Drive, which is done with rclone. There are older packages but they are awful by comparison so don’t waste your time on any other package. More recent rclone packages offer more options than what is shown here, but work basically the same way.


$ sudo apt-get install rclone

$ rclone config




You sign in to your Google account with a regular browser.


After sign-in you see:


rclone wants to access your Google Account

<your_account>@gmail.com

This will allow rclone

to:


See, edit, create, and delete all of your Google Drive files


Make sure you trust rclone


After clicking Allow you get:




Note you can very well keep the root folder id blank. In my case we store all our pictures in one top-level folder and the nested folders get pretty deep, plus there’s a busload of other things on the drive, so I wanted to give rclone the best possible shot at running well. Still, listing our 40,000+ pictures takes 90 seconds or so.


Goofed up your config of rclone? No worries. Remove .config/rclone and start over.


Don’t forget to make all these scripts executable (chmod +x <script_name>:)or you will end up seeing messages like this:




Some noteworthy rclone commands

rclone ls remote: – lists all files, going recursively, no problem with MORE

rclone lsd remote: lists directories in top level of drive

rclone copy remote:”MaryDocs/Pictures and videos/Shutterfly books collection of photos/JJH birth photos/img2165.jpg” .   – copies picture to current directory (does not create directory hierarchy)


Do a complete directory listing, capture the results in a file and see how long it took:

$ time rclone ls remote: > lsf-complete




My initial thought was to do a remote mount of the Google Drive onto a Raspberry Pi mount point, but it’s just so slow that it really provides no advantage to do it that way.


Some encountered issues

Well, I blew up on crontab, which in all my years working with linux/unix I’ve never done before. But I managed to fix it.


Prior to discovering rclone I made the mistake of using gdrivefs to create a mounted Google Drive – sounds great in principle, right? What a disaster. The files’ binary data were not correctly preserved when accessed through the mount though the size was! I have also never encountered a mounting software that corrupted files, but this piece of garbage does. One way to detect corruption in a binary file is to do a cksum (or md5sum, just be consistent and use one or the other) of source file and destination version of same file. The result should be the same number.



Imagined but avoided issue: JPEG orientation

I had prepared a whole python program to orient my pictures correctly, but lo and behold I “discovered” that the -l switch in qiv does that for you! So I actually ripped that whole unnecessary step out.


Conclusion

Re-purposing equipment I had lying around: Raspberry Pi 3, Pi Display, and 40,000 JPEG images on Google Drive, I put together a novel photoframe slideshow which randomly displays a different set of 60 pictures each day. It’s a nice way for us to be exposed to our collection of 17+ years of digital photos.


The qiv really is a quick image viewer, i.e., the slideshow runs clean, like a real one.


Long Todo list


    

  • Improve selection of recent pictures if we’ve just uploaded a bunch of pictures from our smartphones.
    • 

  • Hey, how about also showing some of those short videos we also shot with our camera phones and uploaded to Google Drive? And while we’re at it, re-purposing those cheap USB speakers I bought for RetroPi gaming to get the sound, or play a soundtrack!?
    • 

  • I realize that although the selection of the 20 anchor pictures is initially random, when they plus the 40 additional photos are presented for display additional order is imposed by the shell’s expansion of the regex and this has a tendency to make the pictures more chronologically organized than they would be by chance.
    • 



References and related

PiDisplay


RetroPi, the gaming emulation project for which I bought economical USB speakers.


The rclone home page.


A detailed write-up on using pipresents program where we had a Raspberry Pi drive a mixed media display 9pictures and videos) for a kiosk.




Needless to say, but I’d better say it, the STARTFOLDER in this script is particular to my own Google drive. Customize it as appropriate for your situation.


Then qiv (quick image viewer) is called with a bunch of arguments and some trickery to ensure proper display of files with spaces in the filenames (an anathema for Linux but my spouse doesn’t know that so I gotta deal with it). I call this script qiv.sh.




Here is the perl script which generates the random numbers and associates them to the file listing we’ve just made with rclone, random-files.pl.




Note that to display 60 pictures only 20 random numbers are used, and then the picture 2 prior and the picture two after the one selected by the random number are also displayed. This helps to provide, hopefully, some context to what is being shown without showing all those duplicate pictures that everyone takes nowadays.


There is an attempt to favor recently uploaded pictures but I really haven’t perfected that part of master.sh, it’s more of a thought at this point.


My crontab entries take care of starting a slideshow upon first boot as well as a daily pick of 60 new random pictures!




Use crontab -e to edit your crontab file.


qiv – an easy install

To install qiv


$ sudo apt-get install qiv


Rclone shown in some detail

The real magic is tapping into the Google Drive, which is done with rclone. There are older packages but they are awful by comparison so don’t waste your time on any other package.


$ sudo apt-get install rclone

$ rclone config




You sign in to your Google account with a regular browser.


After sign-in you see:


rclone wants to access your Google Account

<your_account>@gmail.com

This will allow rclone

to:


See, edit, create, and delete all of your Google Drive files


Make sure you trust rclone


After clicking Allow you get:




Note you can very well keep the root folder id blank. In my case we store all our pictures in one top-level folder and the nested folders get pretty deep, plus there’s a busload of other things on the drive, so I wanted to give rclone the best possible shot at running well. Still, listing our 40,000+ pictures takes 90 seconds or so.


Goofed up your config of rclone? No worries. Remove .config/rclone and start over.


Don’t forget to make all these scripts executable (chmod +x <script_name>:)or you will end up seeing messages like this:




Some noteworthy rclone commands

rclone ls remote: – lists all files, going recursively, no problem with MORE

rclone lsd remote: lists directories in top level of drive

rclone copy remote:”MaryDocs/Pictures and videos/Shutterfly books collection of photos/JJH birth photos/img2165.jpg” . : copies picture to current directory (does not create directory hierarchy)


Do a complete directory listing, capture the results in a file and see how long it took:

$ time rclone ls remote: > lsf-complete




My initial thought was to do a remote mount of the Google Drive onto a Raspberry Pi mount point, but it’s just so slow that it really provides no advantage to do it that way.


Some encountered issues

Well, I blew up on crontab, which in all my years working with linux/unix I’ve never done before. But I managed to fix it.


Prior to discovering rclone I made the mistake of using gdrivefs to create a mounted Google Drive – sounds great in principle, right? What a disaster. The files’ binary data were not correctly preserved when accessed through the mount though the size was! I have also never encountered a mounting software that corrupted files, but this piece of garbage does. One way to detect corruption in a binary file is to do a cksum (or md5sum, just be consistent and use one or the other) of source file and destination version of same file. The result should be the same number.



Imagined but avoided issue: JPEG orientation

I had prepared a whole python program to orient my pictures correctly, but lo and behold I “discovered” that the -l switch in qiv does that for you! So I actually ripped that whole unnecessary step out.


Conclusion

Re-purposing equipment I had lying around: Raspberry Pi 3, Pi Display, and 40,000 JPEG images on Google Drive, I put together a novel photoframe slideshow which randomly displays a different set of 60 pictures each day. It’s a nice way for us to be exposed to our collection of 17+ years of digital photos.


The qiv really is a quick image viewer, i.e., the slideshow runs clean, like a real one.


Long Todo list


    

  • Improve selection of recent pictures if we’ve just uploaded a bunch of pictures from our smartphones.
    • 

  • Hey, how about also showing some of those short videos we also shot with our camera phones and uploaded to Google Drive? And while we’re at it, re-purposing those cheap USB speakers I bought for RetroPi gaming to get the sound, or play a soundtrack!?
    • 

  • I realize that although the selection of the 20 anchor pictures is initially random, when they plus the 40 additional photos are presented for display additional order is imposed by the shell’s expansion of the regex and this has a tendency to make the pictures more chronologically organized than they would be by chance.
    • 



References and related

PiDisplay


RetroPi, the gaming emulation project for which I bought economical USB speakers.


The rclone home page.


A detailed write-up on using pipresents program where we had a Raspberry Pi drive a mixed media display 9pictures and videos) for a kiosk.




Needless to say, but I’d better say it, the STARTFOLDER in this script is particular to my own Google drive. Customize it as appropriate for your situation.


Then qiv (quick image viewer) is called with a bunch of arguments and some trickery to ensure proper display of files with spaces in the filenames (an anathema for Linux but my spouse doesn’t know that so I gotta deal with it). I call this script qiv.sh.




Here is the perl script which generates the random numbers and associates them to the file listing we’ve just made with rclone, random-files.pl.




Note that to display 60 pictures only 20 random numbers are used, and then the picture 2 prior and the picture two after the one selected by the random number are also displayed. This helps to provide, hopefully, some context to what is being shown without showing all those duplicate pictures that everyone takes nowadays.


There is an attempt to favor recently uploaded pictures but I really haven’t perfected that part of master.sh, it’s more of a thought at this point.


My crontab entries take care of starting a slideshow upon first boot as well as a daily pick of 60 new random pictures!




Use crontab -e to edit your crontab file.


qiv – an easy install

To install qiv


$ sudo apt-get install qiv


Rclone shown in some detail

The real magic is tapping into the Google Drive, which is done with rclone. There are older packages but they are awful by comparison so don’t waste your time on any other package. More recent rclone packages offer more options than what is shown here, but work basically the same way.


$ sudo apt-get install rclone

$ rclone config




You sign in to your Google account with a regular browser.


After sign-in you see:


rclone wants to access your Google Account

<your_account>@gmail.com

This will allow rclone

to:


See, edit, create, and delete all of your Google Drive files


Make sure you trust rclone


After clicking Allow you get:




Note you can very well keep the root folder id blank. In my case we store all our pictures in one top-level folder and the nested folders get pretty deep, plus there’s a busload of other things on the drive, so I wanted to give rclone the best possible shot at running well. Still, listing our 40,000+ pictures takes 90 seconds or so.


Goofed up your config of rclone? No worries. Remove .config/rclone and start over.


Don’t forget to make all these scripts executable (chmod +x <script_name>:)or you will end up seeing messages like this:




Some noteworthy rclone commands

rclone ls remote: – lists all files, going recursively, no problem with MORE

rclone lsd remote: lists directories in top level of drive

rclone copy remote:”MaryDocs/Pictures and videos/Shutterfly books collection of photos/JJH birth photos/img2165.jpg” .   – copies picture to current directory (does not create directory hierarchy)


Do a complete directory listing, capture the results in a file and see how long it took:

$ time rclone ls remote: > lsf-complete




My initial thought was to do a remote mount of the Google Drive onto a Raspberry Pi mount point, but it’s just so slow that it really provides no advantage to do it that way.


Some encountered issues

Well, I blew up on crontab, which in all my years working with linux/unix I’ve never done before. But I managed to fix it.


Prior to discovering rclone I made the mistake of using gdrivefs to create a mounted Google Drive – sounds great in principle, right? What a disaster. The files’ binary data were not correctly preserved when accessed through the mount though the size was! I have also never encountered a mounting software that corrupted files, but this piece of garbage does. One way to detect corruption in a binary file is to do a cksum (or md5sum, just be consistent and use one or the other) of source file and destination version of same file. The result should be the same number.



Imagined but avoided issue: JPEG orientation

I had prepared a whole python program to orient my pictures correctly, but lo and behold I “discovered” that the -l switch in qiv does that for you! So I actually ripped that whole unnecessary step out.


Conclusion

Re-purposing equipment I had lying around: Raspberry Pi 3, Pi Display, and 40,000 JPEG images on Google Drive, I put together a novel photoframe slideshow which randomly displays a different set of 60 pictures each day. It’s a nice way for us to be exposed to our collection of 17+ years of digital photos.


The qiv really is a quick image viewer, i.e., the slideshow runs clean, like a real one.


Long Todo list


    

  • Improve selection of recent pictures if we’ve just uploaded a bunch of pictures from our smartphones.
    • 

  • Hey, how about also showing some of those short videos we also shot with our camera phones and uploaded to Google Drive? And while we’re at it, re-purposing those cheap USB speakers I bought for RetroPi gaming to get the sound, or play a soundtrack!?
    • 

  • I realize that although the selection of the 20 anchor pictures is initially random, when they plus the 40 additional photos are presented for display additional order is imposed by the shell’s expansion of the regex and this has a tendency to make the pictures more chronologically organized than they would be by chance.
    • 



References and related


Current approach and writeup for this photo frame effort.

PiDisplay


RetroPi, the gaming emulation project for which I bought economical USB speakers.


The rclone home page.


A detailed write-up on using pipresents program where we had a Raspberry Pi drive a mixed media display 9pictures and videos) for a kiosk.




Needless to say, but I’d better say it, the STARTFOLDER in this script is particular to my own Google drive. Customize it as appropriate for your situation.


Then qiv (quick image viewer) is called with a bunch of arguments and some trickery to ensure proper display of files with spaces in the filenames (an anathema for Linux but my spouse doesn’t know that so I gotta deal with it). I call this script qiv.sh.




Here is the perl script which generates the random numbers and associates them to the file listing we’ve just made with rclone, random-files.pl.




Note that to display 60 pictures only 20 random numbers are used, and then the picture 2 prior and the picture two after the one selected by the random number are also displayed. This helps to provide, hopefully, some context to what is being shown without showing all those duplicate pictures that everyone takes nowadays.


There is an attempt to favor recently uploaded pictures but I really haven’t perfected that part of master.sh, it’s more of a thought at this point.


My crontab entries take care of starting a slideshow upon first boot as well as a daily pick of 60 new random pictures!




Use crontab -e to edit your crontab file.


qiv – an easy install

To install qiv


$ sudo apt-get install qiv


Rclone shown in some detail

The real magic is tapping into the Google Drive, which is done with rclone. There are older packages but they are awful by comparison so don’t waste your time on any other package.


$ sudo apt-get install rclone

$ rclone config




You sign in to your Google account with a regular browser.


After sign-in you see:


rclone wants to access your Google Account

<your_account>@gmail.com

This will allow rclone

to:


See, edit, create, and delete all of your Google Drive files


Make sure you trust rclone


After clicking Allow you get:




Note you can very well keep the root folder id blank. In my case we store all our pictures in one top-level folder and the nested folders get pretty deep, plus there’s a busload of other things on the drive, so I wanted to give rclone the best possible shot at running well. Still, listing our 40,000+ pictures takes 90 seconds or so.


Goofed up your config of rclone? No worries. Remove .config/rclone and start over.


Don’t forget to make all these scripts executable (chmod +x <script_name>:)or you will end up seeing messages like this:




Some noteworthy rclone commands

rclone ls remote: – lists all files, going recursively, no problem with MORE

rclone lsd remote: lists directories in top level of drive

rclone copy remote:”MaryDocs/Pictures and videos/Shutterfly books collection of photos/JJH birth photos/img2165.jpg” . : copies picture to current directory (does not create directory hierarchy)


Do a complete directory listing, capture the results in a file and see how long it took:

$ time rclone ls remote: > lsf-complete




My initial thought was to do a remote mount of the Google Drive onto a Raspberry Pi mount point, but it’s just so slow that it really provides no advantage to do it that way.


Some encountered issues

Well, I blew up on crontab, which in all my years working with linux/unix I’ve never done before. But I managed to fix it.


Prior to discovering rclone I made the mistake of using gdrivefs to create a mounted Google Drive – sounds great in principle, right? What a disaster. The files’ binary data were not correctly preserved when accessed through the mount though the size was! I have also never encountered a mounting software that corrupted files, but this piece of garbage does. One way to detect corruption in a binary file is to do a cksum (or md5sum, just be consistent and use one or the other) of source file and destination version of same file. The result should be the same number.



Imagined but avoided issue: JPEG orientation

I had prepared a whole python program to orient my pictures correctly, but lo and behold I “discovered” that the -l switch in qiv does that for you! So I actually ripped that whole unnecessary step out.


Conclusion

Re-purposing equipment I had lying around: Raspberry Pi 3, Pi Display, and 40,000 JPEG images on Google Drive, I put together a novel photoframe slideshow which randomly displays a different set of 60 pictures each day. It’s a nice way for us to be exposed to our collection of 17+ years of digital photos.


The qiv really is a quick image viewer, i.e., the slideshow runs clean, like a real one.


Long Todo list


    

  • Improve selection of recent pictures if we’ve just uploaded a bunch of pictures from our smartphones.
    • 

  • Hey, how about also showing some of those short videos we also shot with our camera phones and uploaded to Google Drive? And while we’re at it, re-purposing those cheap USB speakers I bought for RetroPi gaming to get the sound, or play a soundtrack!?
    • 

  • I realize that although the selection of the 20 anchor pictures is initially random, when they plus the 40 additional photos are presented for display additional order is imposed by the shell’s expansion of the regex and this has a tendency to make the pictures more chronologically organized than they would be by chance.
    • 



References and related

PiDisplay


RetroPi, the gaming emulation project for which I bought economical USB speakers.


The rclone home page.


A detailed write-up on using pipresents program where we had a Raspberry Pi drive a mixed media display 9pictures and videos) for a kiosk.