Obscreen

🧑‍🎄 Open to feature request and pull request

About

Use a RaspberryPi to show a full-screen slideshow (Kiosk-mode)

Features:

• Dead simple chromium webview
• Clear GUI
• Fleet view to manage many devices easily
• Very few dependencies
• JSON database files
• Plugin system
• No stupid pricing plan
• No cloud
• No telemetry

Installation and configuration (docker)

git clone https://github.com/jr-k/obscreen.git
cd obscreen
cp .env.dist .env

# be sure to have a valid file path for AUTOCONFIGURE_LX_FILE variable
# you should use ./var/run/dummy if you don't care about monitor and just want to test
nano .env

# run
docker compose up

Installation (manual)

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y git chromium-browser unclutter

git clone https://github.com/jr-k/obscreen.git 
cd obscreen && pip3 install -r requirements.txt && cp data/db/slideshow.json.dist data/db/slideshow.json && cp .env.dist .env

Configure

• Server configuration is available in .env file.
• Application configuration is available in http://localhost:5000/settings page.

Run

Cli mode

./obscreen.py

Forever with systemctl

sudo ln -s "$(pwd)/system/obscreen.service" /etc/systemd/system/obscreen.service
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable obscreen.service
sudo systemctl start obscreen.service

To troubleshoot you can check logs

sudo journalctl -u obscreen -f 

Usage

• Hostname will be http://localhost:5000 or http://localhost with nginx or http://[SERVER_IP]:[PORT]
• Page which plays slideshow is reachable at http://localhost:5000
• Slideshow manager is reachable at http://localhost:5000/manage

You are done now :)

• If everything is set up correctly, the RaspberryPi shall start chromium in fullscreen directly after boot screen and after some seconds of showing the date & time (views/player/default.jinja.html) your slideshow shall start and loop endlessly.
• Be sure that AUTOCONFIGURE_LX_FILE is writeable !

Additional

A. Hardware checks

• Basic Setup For basic RaspberryPi setup you can use most of the available guides, for example this one: https://gist.github.com/blackjid/dfde6bedef148253f987

• HDMI Mode You may need to set the HDMI Mode on the raspi to ensure the hdmi resolution matches your screen exactly. Here is the official documentation: https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/config-txt/video.md

However, I used this one: (2,82) = 1920x1080 60Hz 1080p

B. Nginx server to serve pages (useful for gzip compression for instance)

1. Install

sudo apt install -y nginx
sudo rm /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default 2>/dev/null
sudo ln -s "$(pwd)/system/nginx-obscreen" /etc/nginx/sites-enabled
sudo systemctl reload nginx

2. Set autoconfigure_reverse_proxy_mode to true in .env file