Project status

This is a small, niche project, built mostly around my own needs. I’ve run it, or rather its earlier iterations, in my living room for nearly ten years.

Maintenance

I’ll keep up with security patches and dependency updates. I don’t have plans for big new features, though. It does what I need, and it has for years.

Why it’s open source

I’d meant to release it for a long time. Part of the reason is selfish: knowing other people might read the code made me think harder about quality. The other part is that a few of the problems I worked out here could be useful elsewhere. The slideshow fader is the clearest example. It took a lot of fiddling before the crossfade looked right on the original Pi Zero, and that work might save someone else the trouble. There’s more on that in the story.

Contributing

If you’re using it and want something it doesn’t do, open an issue. If it’s feasible, I’m happy to build it. I also welcome pull requests, and I’ll merge the ones that are good quality and don’t degrade the core behavior. See Contributing for how to set up a development environment.

Maybe later

A few things I might get to, with no promises on timing:

• Localization for the admin pages. English today, with Hungarian next on my list.
• CEC display power. I’d like to try switching a TV on and off over HDMI-CEC, though in my experience CEC tends to be too finicky to lean on for this.
• Showing photos uncropped. Photos that don’t match the screen’s shape are cropped to fit today. I’d rather show them whole on a matching backdrop, the way the dont-crop library fits a gradient to an image. Doing that on the kiosk is probably too much for the Pi, so I’d first need to generate the backdrop earlier, at upload or sync time.
• Wired GPIO sensors. A way to read motion, temperature, and humidity straight off the Pi’s GPIO over I2C, so a unit is fully self-contained with no broker or smart-home setup. Bluetooth lets the sensor pack sit anywhere in the room, which suits a frame set back on a shelf, but it is more to build, needs a battery, and is less reliable. Wired sensors trade that placement freedom for a simpler, sturdier build. Visitors keep asking where to get a frame like this. It would not make sense as a product (a good screen isn’t cheap, framing costs more, and salvaged panels aren’t a reliable supply), but I would happily build a few simple units for less technical friends and family.