shairport-display-qt

A simple app to be used with shairport-sync with the pi 4b plus the official Raspberry Pi 7" 800 pixel touchscreen

Table of Contents

• Background
• Why use this
• Changes from original
• My Setup
• Usage
• TODO
• DTB Patching

Background

A fork of lrusak/shairport-display-qt for current Pi 4B. Commments here are limited to the changes I made.

Why use this

A UI that displays the current track for shairport-sync is an obvious need for a pi with a screen. lrusak/shairport-display-qt is a light weight equivalent to his original shairport-display as GTK is quite heavy for a raspberry pi (it requires the entire Gnome environment). PyQt is much easier to install: from a base Pi is just 'apt install python3-pyqt5'

Changes from original

• Modification of ui to all black background by default.
• Addition of Previous / PlayPause / Next buttons
• Addition of auto-scrolling for the text fields that exceed field length.
• Removal of the window title bar (it is, after all, full screen)
• Set screen cursor to BlankCursor (it is, after all, a touch screen)
• Volume slider

My Setup

Raspberry 4b with official Raspberry 4b 7" touch screen and a 3d printed black bezel/case/stand combo for the pi+7" screen from thingiverse.

• https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3823646 (touchscreen case RPI 4B)
• https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5364987 (45 degree stand) Note that if you use a pi 4b with a DAC hat the 3d printer case linked may not be appropriate. Mine is running USB digital out and USB to RS232 out to control the amp.

Usage

Basically..

1. Install PyQt on your pi
2. Download at least shairport-display-qt.py and shairport-display.ui and put them in one directory
3. Change autostart for your pi default login as per below
4. Requires shairport-sync running with dbus support
5. To start it remotely, ssh into your pi, export DISPLAY=:0.0 and python3 /full/path/to/script

See usage notes as https://github.com/lrusak/shairport-display-qt however with the following extra information:

Change /etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE-pi/autostart from @lxpanel etc, to set power management/screensaver off and simply run the app. If you need a terminal attach a keyboard and press ctrl+alt+T

@xset -dpms
@python3 /full/path/to/shairport-display-qt.py

TODO

• Add note on the best way to flip the entire orientation of the screen to match preference for cables etc
• Add notes on how to integrate this with 2 or 3 desktops and guestures for swiping to 2 or 3 other full screen apps
• How best to remove the screen brightening / dimming options into a seperate process
• Notes on other full screen X pi apps that could co-exist (internet radio? weather?)

DTB Patching

Unlike a pi 3 of 2018 there is no DTB patching required for the Raspberry pi 4b and 7" display