

Ask HN: Hacking a video wall. - MalphasWats

Hi,<p>I'm working on a project to convert the use of a 9-screen video wall into an information point. We have a spare one at the school I teach in and I've commandeered it for my own propaganda :)<p>I plan to use 9 raspberry pis (which I already have laying around), one to run each of the 9 screens in the array.<p>Initially I was thinking of using Synergy to share the keyboard and mouse of a control laptop in order to configure the screens and change the content as required, but it seemed inelegant and I wondered if anyone had any experience with doing something similar - it strikes me as the sort of thing that might have some development done already but I didn't know where to start.<p>I'd like to be able to do different thing with them over time - show different mixtures of slideshows, webpages, videos and other applications. Eventually, I'd like to include some cool interactive things using cameras and maybe a kinect or something.
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andor
You should take a look at info-beamer. It supports displaying video via
FFMPEG, you could show browser content via VNC, and the best thing is that you
can hot-swap the animation code while it is running. It's a bit like
Processing, but much more lightweight.

Out of the box it doesn't solve your array problem, but maybe you can hack
something up. For example, you could have a huge virtual display on your
control laptop, and show parts of it on the Raspberry Pi's via VNC. Or you
could have a "crop" parameter in all your animations, so that every Pi can
render a different part (required perfect timing, though).

<http://info-beamer.org/>

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MalphasWats
This looks interesting, thanks.

At the moment I don't want to use it as a single display, rather display 9
different things (and various permutations thereof).

I plan to hack something together, but I'm struggling to envision how it
should all look, so this is a good start.

