Introduction: Synced Video Tryptic With Raspberry Pies and Laptop Screens
06/24/2016 UPDATE: I reimplemented all the functionality described below in C++ using openframeworks. Code and instructions: https://github.com/thomashollier/triptych --- END OF UPDATE
A filmmaker friend approached me to design a display device that would allow her to display a video tryptic at the 2015 Venice Art Walk. The idea was to create a frame that would contain all the components necessary to play three different videos on three separate screens in perfect sync. It should be simple and should not need to be connected to a bunch of cables or computers. The goal was to hang it, plug it, turn it on and forget it… Oh, and did I mention it should not cost an arm and a leg?
Based on my previous tinkering activities, I felt that this project was within my reach and so I started researching parts. My first order was for 3 Raspberry Pi 2 mini computers, 3 replacement laptop LCD screens and the 3 driver boards they needed to be connected to the Pi’s HDMI output. Along with that, I got the various necessary AC adapters to power all this mess.
Step 1: Framing and Mounting the Electronics
The first order of business was to create an aluminum frame to mount the screens to. I got some standard aluminum rods from home depot and cut them to size. I drilled some small holes in the vertical aluminum studs and mounted the screens by using the small screw holes along their edges that are designed for them to be mounted in the laptop. Next, I cut two horizontal struts that I screwed the vertical studs to and ended up with a nice sturdy frame that the screens were securely mounted to. For the top strut, I used an angle piece, and for the bottom strut, I used a plat piece that was wide enough to mount the electronics. A few holes, and 18 small bolts, nuts and screws later later, the electronics were on! I plugged everything in and it all lit up just fine…
Step 2: Networking the Three Raspberry Pi
The next order of business was figuring out how to get the machines to talk to each other. The raspberry Pi comes with a set of GPIO that can be wired together to send triggers back and forth, but that would be a little limited. Also, since I quickly realized I would need ethernet to log in and customize the raspbian operating system on each individual machine, I decided to use OSC to trigger all the necessary events over TCP/IP. I got a small USB hub, pried open the cheap plastic case, liberated the small electronic circuit housed therein and proceeded to mount it to the frame itself. I connected ethernet cables between the hub and the three machines, and also connected the hub to my home router which allowed me to connect to and set up the Raspberry Pies from my laptop.
For this to work reliably and predictably, I changed the Pies’ IP address to be static, and while I was there, I changed the hostnames, and set it up to automatically log in to the command line without loading the desktop interface.
To set up the static IP to 192.168.11.45, edit /etc/network/interfaces and replace:
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
with:
iface wlan0 inet static<br>address 192.168.11.45 <br>netmask 255.255.255.0<br>gateway 192.168.11.1<br>network 192.168.11.1<br>broadcast 192.168.11.255
To setup the hostname, replace it to your desired name in/etc/hostname, and also list all the other hostnames with their static IPs in /etc/hosts. Lastly, to log directly into the command line interface without having to enter a username and password, edit the file/etc/inittab and replace the line:
1:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty 115200 tty1
with:
1:2345:respawn:/bin/login -f pi tty1 /dev/tty1 2>&1<br>
Step 3: Power Supply and Getting Rid of Wall Warts
All this electronickery runs on 12V and 5V DC, and typically, you use one of these a lovely black boxy power adapter for each component. At this point in the build, I had everything working but I was relying on 7 of these wall warts plugged into a power strip to get it all powered. I didn’t have room on the frame itself to mount all this crap and I didn’t want 7 wires coming out of it so I started looking into a better way to supply power. The monitors needed 12V and each seemed to be running along fine with a 2A supply. The Raspberry Pies and the ethernet hub each used 5V and 1A each at most. I searched on ebay and found 12V power supplies usually used for home LED lighting, and figured that getting one rated for 10 amps would be more than enough to cover the requirements of the frame. I also got a step down converter for the pieces that required 5V.Wire time… AC power cord into 12V power supply, 3 sets of wires with DC power barrel jacks connecting the 12V output to each of the monitors, 1 set of wires connecting to the 12V to 5V step down converter. 5V output of the down converter to the raspberry pies and the ethernet hub. One of the challenges here was trying to solder wire to the micro USB plugs I had bought. It’s all way too small and I ended up with an ugly heap, kind f like Jeff Goldblum and the fly in “The Fly”, except with melted lead and plastic. In the end, I just bought some USB cables with the proper connection, cut them and rewired them to fit my needs.
Step 4: Software: Auto Start
I needed the movies to start automatically when the machines were done booting, so I modified the .bashrc file to run my main script whenever it was being accessed at the end of a boot sequence (I didn’t want to launch my movie playback script every time I logged in from another machine). I look for the $L1 environment variable that gets to “tty1″ only when logging to the console from the boot sequence. I added the following at the top of /home/pi/.bashrc:
if [ “$L1″ == “tty1″ ] then
sudo /home/pi/video_player.py
fi
Step 5: Software: Playing Back and Syncing the Movies
For movie playback, I made the obvious choice and used omxplayer which is custom written for the Raspberry Pi hardware and can play full 30fps HD video from the GPU, and there’s even a crude little library called pyomxplayer that allows control from python. In order to get the pyomxplayer library to run, I had to install the pexpect python library which allows it script to spawn and control the omxplayer process. Also, pyomxplayer tries to parse the text output by omxplayer but it seems like that part of the code has changed and causes the script to fail and exit so I had to remove that part of the code. I also added a function to allow me to rewind the movie. As soon as my script starts, omxplayer loads the appropriate movie file and pauses at the beginning.
As for syncing the start of the three movies, I used pyOSC to have the machines automatically establish a connection when they boot up and unpause the movies at the same instant when all three machines are ready. The basic process goes like this: I designate one machine to be the master and the two others to be slaves. When the master boots up, it first listens for a signal from each the slaves, and stays in this mode until it has heard from both. On their end, the slaves’ first action during launch is to send a signal to the master. As soon as the master has heard from both slaves, it tells the slaves to switch to a state where they listen to the master for commands. At this point, the master unpauses the movie the slaves to do the same. Since omxplayer has no looping function I could find that worked for me, I have the master wait for the length of the movie and then rewind to movies to the beginning and start them playing over again.
Step 6: Software: RAM Disk Playback and Tweaking Timing
In order to avoid continually reading from the SD card, I created a ram disk so my script could copy the movie file to it and allow omxplayer to play back from there.
I created the directory for the ram disk’s mount point:
sudo mkdir /var/ramdisk
and added the following to the /etc/fstab file:
ramdisk /var/ramdisk tmpfs nodev,nosuid,size=500M 0 0
The Raspberry Pi 2 comes with 1 GB of ram so I used half of it for the drive, which left plenty for the OS to run.
Fundamentally, pyomxplayer and the pexpect approach it uses is an ingenious but somewhat hacky way to control the process and it took me a long time to get everything to work properly. I found that if my script sent commands to omxplayer too fast, omxplayer would miss the command. I had to put a bunch of sleep statements in my code to pause and allow enough time for commands to get properly “heard” by the omxplayer process. Also, I added a long pause right after the movie is first loaded into omxplayer to make sure any residual and proc intensive boot process has a chance to finish and does not interfere with the responsiveness of each machine. It’s far from a robust setup; It’s basically a script that tells three machines to press the “play” button at the same time. Ultimately, though, I seemed to be able to get the movies to sync well enough across all three machines. Not guaranteed to be frame perfect every time but probably within one or two frames on a reliable basis.
Step 7: Software: Powering Off and Rebooting Through GPIO
Since the frame will be fully autonomous, it will not have a keyboard to allow an operator to properly power off the Raspberry Pies. This is a challenge because if you directly unplug the power to turn them off, the SD card will most likely get corrupted and you will not be able to reboot the machine. So, I needed to setup a simple way to cleanly shutdown the machines before turning the power off. I also wanted to be able to reboot if somehow something unexpected happened that threw the machine out of sync. So, I connected the master machine to a couple of switches and set the script up to power off or reboot if the GPIO interface detects a specific button press.
Step 8: Framing
We went back and forth between modern designs that would let you see through to the electronics and the more traditional framing approach we ended up settling on. Since the screens and computers were all mounted to the central aluminum structure, the process was not too difficult; it was just a matter of hanging a skin on it. We came up with a cool Arts and Craft inspired box frame and a setup of brackets that sandwiched the electronics in place. The most sensitive part was getting precise measurements of the screens to make sure the CNC’d matte, which was made of MDF and painted black, fit perfectly on the screens.The last few details consisted of mounting the tactile switches connected to the GPIO pins for shutting down or rebooting the machines, soldering on a mini jack connected to the master Raspberry Pi and provide audio from the outside, and lastly, installing a main power switch for the whole unit.
Step 9: Code
Here is the code. You will need to install pyomxplayer, pexpect, and pyOSC. Also, depending on your version of omxplayer, you may need to modify pyomxplayer because of the way it attempts to parse omxplayer's output. This script works for both the master and the slave based on the hostname. Here is the basic process:
- When all machines boot up, they copy the relevant media to the ram drive, and launch it in omxplayer in a paused state
- The slaves then go into a startup loop sending a "ready" address to the master until they hear back.
- The master goes into a loop to check if both slaves are ready, listening for a "ready" address from each.
- When the master determines that both slaves are ready, it sends a "listen" address to the slaves and the slaves come out of their startup loop.
- From here on out, the master controls the slaves through OSC to unpause/pause/rewind the movies indefinitely.
- The machines either reboot or shut down when the specific GPIO pin gets set on the master.
<p>#!/usr/bin/python<br>
import OSC
import threading, socket, shutil
from pyomxplayer import OMXPlayer
from time import sleep
'''
Thomas Hollier, 2015.
'''
hosts = {'master':'192.168.11.45', 'slave1':'192.168.11.46', 'slave2':'192.168.11.47'}
movies = {'master':'/home/pi/media/movie_lf.mov', 'slave1':'/home/pi/media/movie_cn.mov', 'slave2':'/home/pi/media/movie_rt.mov'}
movieLength = 60*5
hostname = socket.gethostname()
print "copying %s to /var/ramdisk" % movies[hostname]
shutil.copy(movies[hostname], "/var/ramdisk/")
movies[hostname] = movies[hostname].replace('/home/pi/media', '/var/ramdisk')
print "playing movie from %s" % movies[hostname]
omx = OMXPlayer(movies[hostname])
sleep(5)
omx.toggle_pause()
sleep(1)
omx.rewind()
sleep(1)
def reboot():
command = "/usr/bin/sudo /sbin/shutdown -r now"
import subprocess
process = subprocess.Popen(command.split(), stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
output = process.communicate()[0]
print output
def poweroff():
command = "/usr/bin/sudo /sbin/shutdown -h now"
import subprocess
process = subprocess.Popen(command.split(), stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
output = process.communicate()[0]
print output
if hostname == 'master':
def gpio_check():
import RPi.GPIO as GPIO
GPIO.setmode(GPIO.BCM)
GPIO.setup(23, GPIO.IN, pull_up_down=GPIO.PUD_UP)
GPIO.setup(24, GPIO.IN, pull_up_down=GPIO.PUD_UP)
while True:
input_state = GPIO.input(23)
if input_state == False:
print('Detected a reboot request: Button 23 Pressed')
send_reboot(slaves['slave1'][2])
send_reboot(slaves['slave2'][2])
sleep(.3)
reboot()
input_state = GPIO.input(24)
if input_state == False:
print('Detected a poweroff request: Button 24 Pressed')
send_poweroff(slaves['slave1'][2])
send_poweroff(slaves['slave2'][2])
print('Button 24 Pressed')
sleep(.3)
poweroff()
sleep(.1)
gpio_thread = threading.Thread(target=gpio_check)
gpio_thread.start()
# send listen
def send_listen(slaveServer):
print "querying slave", slaveServer
msg = OSC.OSCMessage()
msg.setAddress("/listen") # set OSC address
msg.append(" the master.\nThe master is pausing for 20 seconds.") # int
slaveServer.send(msg) # send it!
# send play command
def send_play(slaveServer):
print "sending play to", slaveServer
msg = OSC.OSCMessage()
msg.setAddress("/play") # set OSC address
msg.append("the master") # int
slaveServer.send(msg) # send it!
# send toggle_pause command
def send_toggle_pause(slaveServer):
print "sending toggle_pause to", slaveServer
msg = OSC.OSCMessage()
msg.setAddress("/toggle_pause") # set OSC address
msg.append("the master") # int
slaveServer.send(msg) # send it!
# send rewind command
def send_rewind(slaveServer):
print "sending rewind to", slaveServer
msg = OSC.OSCMessage()
msg.setAddress("/rewind") # set OSC address
msg.append("the master") # int
slaveServer.send(msg) # send it!
# send reboot command
def send_reboot(slaveServer):
print "sending reboot to", slaveServer
msg = OSC.OSCMessage()
msg.setAddress("/reboot") # set OSC address
msg.append("the master") # int
slaveServer.send(msg) # send it!
# send poweroff command
def send_poweroff(slaveServer):
print "sending poweroff to", slaveServer
msg = OSC.OSCMessage()
msg.setAddress("/poweroff") # set OSC address
msg.append("the master") # int
slaveServer.send(msg) # send it!
# handler for ready address
def ready_handler(addr, tags, stuff, source):
if not slaves[stuff[0]][0]:
slaves[stuff[0]][0] = True
print "setting %s to ready" % stuff[0]
# setup clients to send messages to
slavesReady = False
c1 = OSC.OSCClient()
c2 = OSC.OSCClient()
slaves = {'slave1':[False, (hosts['slave1'], 9000), c1] , 'slave2':[False, (hosts['slave2'], 9000), c2] }
# set up self to receive messages
receive_address = hosts['master'], 9000
s = OSC.OSCServer(receive_address) # basic
s.addDefaultHandlers()
s.addMsgHandler("/ready", ready_handler) # adding our function
# Start OSCServer
print "\nStarting OSCServer. Use ctrl-C to quit."
st = threading.Thread( target = s.serve_forever )
st.start()
# set up clients to send messages to
slaves['slave1'][2].connect( slaves['slave1'][1] ) # set the address for all following messages
slaves['slave2'][2].connect( slaves['slave2'][1] ) # set the address for all following messages
#########
# establish communication
print "Master is waiting to hear from the slaves."
# The master waits until both slaves are ready
while not slavesReady:
sleep(.01)
if slaves['slave1'][0] and slaves['slave2'][0]:
slavesReady = True
print "The master has heard from both slaves"
# The master tells the slaves to listen
send_listen(slaves['slave1'][2])
send_listen(slaves['slave2'][2])
print "The master has told the slaves to listen"
print "Pausing for 20 seconds"
# catch our breath
sleep(20)
#########
# media control
# we go into an infinite loop where we
# unpause, wait for the movie length
# pause, wait, rewind, wait, unpause
print "entering main loop"
while True:
send_toggle_pause(slaves['slave1'][2])
send_toggle_pause(slaves['slave2'][2])
omx.toggle_pause()
sleep(movieLength)
send_toggle_pause(slaves['slave1'][2])
send_toggle_pause(slaves['slave2'][2])
omx.toggle_pause()
sleep(2)
send_rewind(slaves['slave1'][2])
send_rewind(slaves['slave2'][2])
omx.rewind()
sleep(2)
else:
thisName = hostname
thisIP = hosts[hostname], 9000
masterStatus = {'awake':[False], 'play':[False]}
masterAddress = hosts['master'], 9000
def send_ready(c):
msg = OSC.OSCMessage()
msg.setAddress("/ready") # set OSC address
msg.append(thisName) # int
try:
c.send(msg)
except:
pass
def listen_handler(add, tags, stuff, source):
print "I was told to listen by%s" % stuff[0]
masterStatus['awake'][0] = True
def play_handler(add, tags, stuff, source):
print "I was told to play by %s" % stuff[0]
masterStatus['play'][0] = True
def toggle_pause_handler(add, tags, stuff, source):
print "I was told to toggle_pause by %s" % stuff[0]
omx.toggle_pause()
def rewind_handler(add, tags, stuff, source):
print "I was told to rewind by %s" % stuff[0]
omx.rewind()
masterStatus['awake']=False
def reboot_handler(add, tags, stuff, source):
print "I was told to reboot by %s" % stuff[0]
reboot()
def poweroff_handler(add, tags, stuff, source):
print "I was told to poweroff by %s" % stuff[0]
poweroff()
###########
# create a client to send messages to master
c = OSC.OSCClient()
c.connect( masterAddress )
###########
# listen to messages from master
receive_address = thisIP
s = OSC.OSCServer(receive_address) # basic
# define handlers
s.addDefaultHandlers()
s.addMsgHandler("/listen", listen_handler)
s.addMsgHandler("/play", play_handler)
s.addMsgHandler("/toggle_pause", toggle_pause_handler)
s.addMsgHandler("/rewind", rewind_handler)
s.addMsgHandler("/reboot", reboot_handler)
s.addMsgHandler("/poweroff", poweroff_handler)
# Start OSCServer
print "\nStarting OSCServer. Use ctrl-C to quit."
st = threading.Thread( target = s.serve_forever )
st.start()
print "%s connecting to master." % hostname
while True:
#########i##
# keep sending ready signals until master sends a message
# on the /listen address which gets us out of this loop
while not masterStatus['awake'][0]:
sleep(.01)
send_ready(c)
##########
# once the master has taken control, we do nothing
# and let the master drive playback through handlers</p>Step 10: Parts
3 raspberry pi 2
3 LTN156AT02-D02 Samsung 15.6" WXGA replacement screens (ebay)
3 HDMI+DVI+VGA+Audio Controller Board Driver Kit for LTN156AT02 (ebay)
1 D-Link - 5-Port 10/100 Mbps Fast Ethernet Switch
DC 12V 10A Regulated Transformer Power Supply (typically used for LED strips)
DC-DC 12V/ 24V to 5V 10A Converter Step Down Regulator Module
Aluminum, mini usb cables, 3 ethernet cables, 3 ethernet cables, nuts and bolts, tactile switch, power switch, wire...