Hi
I an thinking about having a go at adding a display to the Pi doing the logging / forwarding in order to display the "My Electric" graph. ( The one in blue running on the tablet in the Kickstarter video ) The screen could connect via HDMI or the Pi's SPI interface.
Has anyone done this ?
Does the Pi have enough resources to run the GUI and browser as well as doing its serial reading and forwarding ?
Thanks
Lionel
Re: Connecting a screen to the Pi
Did you see the Local display on RPi thread?
A Pi B shouldn't have too much trouble (an A will struggle), the GUI/browser will probably present a challenge to an original Pi B or B+ so expect slow responses when navigating, but a new Pi 2 B with 4x cores and double the RAM should be more than capable although still not lightning fast (although it will appear so in comparison).
Paul
Re: Connecting a screen to the Pi
Thanks Paul, I did see it. It ended with JD saying that it looked promising in theory, so I was really asking if anyone was actually doing it.
Im not to worried about the response when navigating. My idea is to try set it up so that it goes straight to that display on boot and stays there.
What does concern me, is if adding a display will have any effect on the Pi and compromise its ability to properly read and forward its data. It wont be much good if you have a nice display, but its dropping some of its data because its playing catch up the whole time.
Lionel
Re: Connecting a screen to the Pi
I have a HDMIPi LCD panel I want to experiment using for this setup, just need to get round to setting up web browser to launch at startup http://hdmipi.com/. An RM69Pi can even be connected to the Pi at the rear of the screen
Re: Connecting a screen to the Pi
I have been running a Pi 2 with HDMI display for a few months. Emonhub is also running on the Pi 2. I haven't had any problems with interference between the two functions running at once.
I have had problems with the web browsers however. I haven't figured out how to boot straight into a reliable full screen web browser with my dashboard loaded. There have been several problems. I gave up on Epiphany due to crashes. I have been using Midori which seems to work for weeks on end without a crash but I can't get it to boot into full screen w/o title bar, and it renders kinda ugly. The screen saver in StartX is also very aggressive, and kicks in despite setting the time to "0" which is off, and ignores several .conf file changes that were suggested.
The Chromium browser offers full screen "kiosk mode", but I have not been able to get it to work.
I am not a good programmer however... maybe someone who has real skillz could solve the issues and make it a reliable emonGLCD alternative. I want to run full screen dashboards on a big screen in a school classroom for example, so the kids can learn about energy usage and solar production.
Ideally this would have a scheduler (to sleep the screen at night), and maybe the ability to rotate between several web pages / dashboards, like a signage player.