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I built this to automate syncing images to a photo viewer I made. It leverages Dropbox for hosting, but curl/wget for obtaining download instructions. A previous version used rsync over SSH for syncing, but was not super-helpful to general populous. The photoviewer I built was powered by a rasperry-pi.

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Syncing Slideshow for Raspberry Pi: A Dropbox public sync work-around

Preface

Note: This is deprecated in favor of chromecast album sharing--at least until I feel like adding the ability to share video. But the 4k chromecast that is about to come out might have that as well--not sure if it has it for screensaver mode, though. We will see.

A quick way to share dropbox folders with a remote device for use as a slideshow. For example, sharing public links to zip files with a raspberry pi that polls for new data.

This bypasses the need for Dropbox syncing on the raspberry pi. Dropbox doesn't work on ARM processors, making work-arounds like this kinda necessary.

Introduction

A quick way to share dropbox folders with a remote device for use as a slideshow. For example, sharing public links to zip files with a raspberry pi that polls for new data.

This bypasses the need for Dropbox syncing on the raspberry pi. Dropbox doesn't work on ARM processors, making work-arounds like this kinda necessary.

Install

Docker support may come later. For now, to install, place the contents of this somewhere on your raspberry pi. As root, cd into this folder and run the following: ./install.sh. If you want to specify that it store files on an external device you can use the equivalent of ./install /dev/sda1/. This will set up .bashrc to call the donwloader which will loop in the background.

ToDo Items

Of course, this project could be improved. Following are some ways.

  • Ability to dockerize the downloader and the fbi viewer
  • Ability to remove files via remote command
  • Ability to switch to a movie mode
  • Ability to switch between random vs. ordered image viewing
  • An uninstall file

O, this can be simplified down to to something of a cron job. The downloader will call reboot if necessary. Really, the crux of this is that fbi is run upon login to make the raspberry pi just work upon boot.

A Note

This program attempts to download a new version of itself after running. Of course, if git is possible, then that can be used. But since wget was the dependency of choice here, I continued with it to keep things light-weight, simple, and less dependent. Really, I'm hoping Dropbox comes out with ARM support sooner than later. It would deprecate a lot of this quite rapidly.

About

I built this to automate syncing images to a photo viewer I made. It leverages Dropbox for hosting, but curl/wget for obtaining download instructions. A previous version used rsync over SSH for syncing, but was not super-helpful to general populous. The photoviewer I built was powered by a rasperry-pi.

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