Leaffront

A weather station and notification synchronisation platform, designed to run pretty much anywhere. Targeted at the Raspberry Pi.

Building

Building the application should be fairly simple as long as you are compiling on the target platform.

cd station
cargo build --features glutin

Replace glutin with your preferred frontend.

Running

Two things (other then the application binary) are required to run Leaffront in the working directory:

• An art directory, containing .jpgs or .pngs. This can be empty, but Leaffront will only display a blank screen.
• A config.toml file. An example can be found here.

If you want to use Redis for notifications, you also going to need this installed and running. This can be found in the Debian package redis-server.

Cross-compilation (for the Raspberry Pi)

Cross-compiling is possible with the frontends provided (and is pretty much essential when targeting a platform such as the Pi), but requires a bit of hacking around.

Firstly, ensure that you have Rustup installed on your building machine, then you are going to want to install the required cross-compiling utilities (For Debian):

sudo apt-get install gcc-4.7-arm-linux-gnueabihf
rustup target add armv7-unknown-linux-gnueabihf

Several dependencies require a generic path to gcc, so a few ugly symlink may be required:

ln -s /usr/bin/arm-linux-gnueabihf-gcc-4.7 /usr/bin/arm-linux-gnueabihf-gcc
cp -r /usr/include/GL /usr/arm-linux-gnueabihf/include/GL

You are going to want to configure Cargo to find this linker in ~/.cargo/config:

[target.armv7-unknown-linux-gnueabihf]
linker = "arm-linux-gnueabihf-gcc-4.7"

Finally, you are going to need access to the Raspberry Pi's OpenGLES/DispmanX/etc stack. This can be found on a Raspberry Pi at /opt/vc/lib, which is the location which will be assumed from here on. These artifacts can also be found here (as of writing): https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/tree/master/opt/vc/lib

The supplied station/build.sh script will automatically invoke Cargo, strip the build artifact, and package it into a .deb file targeting armv7-unknown-linux-gnueabihf.

As Leaffront directly uses the the hardware video scaler and OpenGLES, a X server cannot run at the same time.

Using systemd

There is a systemd .service file provided for the Raspberry Pi, which can be found here. This runs as a system service, not a user one, and is only really useful in automated systems where there is no requirement for a X server.

The best way to use Leaffront on a traditional desktop platform would by via launching the executable from your DE.

D-Bus Notification support

The D-Bus bridge allows for messages sent via Gnome's Notification system, which is used by a whole array of GUI applications.

See here for more information.

Networked notifications

(TODO)

License

Leaffront is licensed under the MIT license, which can be found here.