sdellenb / joybox

A kid-friendly touch-controlled library media player on the Raspberry Pi

joybox

A kid-friendly touch-controlled library media player on the Raspberry Pi

Targetted Hardware (i.e. only tested with)

• Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ running Raspbian Stretch
• Pimoroni HyperPixel 4.0 Touch Screen
• Adafruit Mini External USB Stereo Speaker

Requirements

1. Node.js v12.x (LTS):
   https://github.com/nodesource/distributions/blob/master/README.md#debinstall

2. Yarn 1.19.x:
   https://yarnpkg.com/lang/en/docs/install/#debian-stable
   Important on Raspberry Pi: Execute yarn config set child-concurrency 1 before executing yarn install.
   Otherwise the SDCard will get hammered by 5 parallel build processes and the system will overload!

3. Raspbian Stretch Packages (additional to Raspbian Lite)

• omxplayer for media playback
• chromium-browser for the Web UI
• An X desktop environment (I used LXDE) with autologin enabled.

Setup

1. Fork/Clone

2. Install dependencies with yarn install

3. Create the SQLite database and tables with npm run initdb (or npm run initdb:prod)

4. Fill the library SQLite database with npm run scan (or npm run scan:prod)
   This will execute knex seed:run --env development to seed the database with the contents of the media folder.

5. Fire up the server with npm start

6. Start the front-end with DISPLAY=:0 chromium-browser --kiosk http://localhost:3000

Disclaimer

Most of the REST API & DB backend code is based on the examples in https://github.com/mjhea0/node-koa-api.
It was of great help to have such a nice template to implement my own requirements.

Notes

Volume control with amixer

amixer cset numid=3,iface=MIXER,name='PCM Playback Volume' 10%

Playback control with omxplayer

omxplayer -o alsa media/one_love.mp3

Other omxplayer options

-l  --pos n                 Start position (hh:mm:ss)
    --no-osd                Do not display status information on screen
    --no-keys               Disable keyboard input (prevents hangs for certain TTYs)