The aim of this project is to provide more features to the DAKboard (raspberry pi version). The DAK board is an amazing wifi connected wall display for your photos, calendar, news and weather. Create your own DAKboard, a beautiful wall display for your photos, calendar, news and weather, powered by a Raspberry Pi! https://dakboard.com
Yup, I'm cheating. My project is not really an extension. I am just finding a way to switch chromium tabs or application with an external hardware. External Keybord connected to the raspberry for the moment.
The DAKboard is very useful and estheticaly perfect but I am expecting
more information from a dashboard. Let's say traffic, specific wind forcast,
trades and so on. DAKboard is actually running a Chromium tab in full
screen mode. Nothing else complicated. What about to open new tabs with
websites to display?
A new question is raising. How to interact with the display to switch the tabs?
What about to build a user interface feeling like in Minority Report?
The APDS-9960 sensor offers proximity detection and touchless gesture sensing. With this gesture Sensor it will be possible to control the dashboard with a simple swipe of the hand!
The full setup of the raspberry pi to run DAKboard is detailed here:
https://dakboard.com/blog/diy-wall-display/
Go te next step when it's done
DAKboard on raspberry is displaying a predefined web page with chromium in full screen mode
Chromium is launched at the startup like this:
sudo nano ~/.config/lxsession/LXDE-pi/autostart
@chromium-browser --noerrdialogs --incognito --kiosk http://dakboard.com/app/?p=YOUR_PRIVATE_URL
It's very easy to add tabs. Just add the URL in the lane.
sudo nano ~/.config/lxsession/LXDE-pi/autostart
@chromium-browser --noerrdialogs --incognito --kiosk http://dakboard.com/app/?p=YOUR_PRIVATE_URL http://website_opened_in_tab2 http://website_opened_in_tab3
There is several ways to move in the tab list opened in chromium. Let's focus in this two:
The first one is CTRL+TAB to move to the next tab and CTRL+SHIFT+TAB to move backward. This is quit interesting when a lot of tabs are opened. Only 1 key is requiered to navigate.
The second way is to use CTRL+1 to move to tab 1, CTRL+2 to move to tab 2 and so on. This is a direct access to the webpage when few tabs are opened.
The expectation is to switch tabs left or right regarding the swipe of the habd direction.
Swipe left = ctrl+tab
Swipe right = ctrl+shift+tab
Swipe up = page down
Swipe down = page up
The script I wrote for this gesture control is based on Thomas Liske python library for the APDS-9960 gesture sensor. (Which is also a port of the APDS-9960 Raspberry Pi Library of Justin Woodman).
git clone https://github.com/liske/python-apds9960.git
To be continued ...