At the EAA, we were having the Tri-motor come and provide rides. For a couple of the evening fund raising events, Richard asked me to do a slideshow running in the background. I usually do this on my laptop, but I didn't want to have to be there the whole time to keep an eye on it. Aha, I have a spare Raspberry Pi that I haven't started using yet!

First off, I installed 2015-05-05 Wheezy, and did the auto setup so that it'll log on as the "pi" user and immediately run X. I had it working on the network at this point by just giving it the password to my Wi-Fi.

Next I updated everything: sudo apt-get update

and installed qiv: sudo apt-get install qiv

I created a /home/pi/slides directory, and used WinSCP to put the pictures from my PC in there.

After that, I needed to turn off the screen blanking in /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf:

xserver-command=X -s 0 -dpms

Then it was just a matter of autostarting qiv on boot. In /home/pi/.config/lxsession/LXDE/autostart:

@qiv -fismd 30 /home/pi/slides/*.*

[-f = full screen

-i = disable status bar

-m = zoom to full screen and preserve aspect ratio

-d 30 = duration of 10 seconds for each slide

/home/pi/slides/*.* = display all files in slides directory]

I rebooted, and it was working :o)

Then it was a matter of bashing out a case quickly. Vic had some left over Coroplast, and I cut that up into slices for a case.

You can see the cut outs for the micro-SD card, the audio, micro-USB and HDMI ports.

I had thought about leaving the Wi-Fi dongle plugged in so I could pass new images to it, but then figured I was unlikely to carry an access point to the airfield, so screw it. I held this monstrosity together with a couple of zip ties: