Foyer Display

Upcoming events slideshow on a Raspberry Pi.

Our theatre wanted a way to display a slideshow of upcoming shows in the foyer. To keep the infrastructure simple we wanted to run this on a Raspberry Pi.

We have a central Google spreadsheet with details of upcoming shows and we wanted to use this as the source, allowing the display to update automatically while also wanting the slideshow to keep running even if network connectivity was lost.

We used Info Beamer for the slideshow itself, giving me my first (and only) experience of programming in Lua to create a slideshow display of images and a tickertape display beneath it. This displays images from a directory on the Raspberry Pi.

To create the images in that directory, I wrote a python script to periodically pull down the updated data and to generate an image based on it, including a linked image also stored in Google Drive.

To allow for the easy use of those images in social media I have also created a duplicate version of the image generation in PHP which runs in a webpage.