A user asks:
My Raspberry Pi’s are already setup on a wall running various dashboards
via wifi. Everything is controlled using SSH and automatic cron jobs.I have limited access to the devices and no access to ethernet cables.
My question is:
Is it possible to install the “magic video wall” on a couple of the
devices using “apt get” and then just start the applications via SSH
when I need to use it?Or do I have to dedicate whole seperate SD cards if I want to use the
“magic video wall” software?
That’s possible, but with big drawbacks. Let me elaborate: The info-beamer OS that works together with the info-beamer.com web dashboard is a specialized Linux distribution we put together. At its core there’s the info-beamer process running. It is responsible for generating the visual output. This software is available as a standalone version. See here: info-beamer pi - A Digital Signage Player for the Raspberry PI.
The code for the magic video wall is open source (GitHub - info-beamer/package-magic-video-wall: A video wall that configures itself by just taking a picture of your screens) and all you need to get this running is a proper config.json file. Generating one of the magic video wall is no easy task though as usually all the calculations and tag detection is done in the config.html which gets included in the dashboard configuration page. Running this independently is complicated.
Since you show dashboards already, I suspect that your screens are not rotated but rather organized in a grid? In that case, the following package (GitHub - info-beamer/grid-player: Play videos/images on a grid of screens. Use multiple screens as a single giant screen.) would be easier as you just specify the position inside the grid (so for example x=1, y=1). But you’d also have to generate a config.json file. You could start with the value of config in the presets value in node.json.
TD;DR: Yes, it’s possible, but really clunky. There’s a reason we build an easy to use service around the raw info-beamer pi software: To make it usable by mere mortals.