joybox

A kid-friendly touch-controlled library media player on the Raspberry Pi

Targetted Hardware (i.e. only tested with)

• Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ running Raspbian Stretch
• Pimoroni HyperPixel 4.0 Touch Screen
• Adafruit Mini External USB Stereo Speaker

Requirements

Frontend

• Node.js v14.x (LTS):
  https://github.com/nodesource/distributions/blob/master/README.md#debinstall
• Yarn 1.22.x:
  https://yarnpkg.com/lang/en/docs/install/#debian-stable
  Important on Raspberry Pi: Execute yarn config set child-concurrency 1 before executing yarn install.
  Otherwise the SDCard will get hammered by 5 parallel build processes and the system will overload!

Backend

• .NET Core 3.1 SDK for Linux: dotnet-core-3.1

System

• Raspbian Stretch Packages (additional to Raspbian Lite)
  • omxplayer for media playback
  • chromium-browser for the Web UI
  • An X desktop environment (I used LXDE) with autologin enabled.
• .NET Core 3.1 Runtime for Linux (ARM32): dotnet-core-3.1

Setup (OUTDATED)

1. Fork/Clone

2. Install dependencies with yarn install

3. Create the SQLite database and tables with npm run initdb (or npm run initdb:prod)

4. Fill the library SQLite database with npm run scan (or npm run scan:prod)
   This will execute knex seed:run --env development to seed the database with the contents of the media folder.

5. Fire up the server with npm start

6. Start the front-end with DISPLAY=:0 chromium-browser --kiosk http://localhost:3000

Install Dependencies

Go to the joybox2 folder and install client App dependencies with:

$ yarn install

If your IDE doesn't automatically install your .NET NuGet Dependencies, you can manually install them with:

$ dotnet restore

Dev Workflow

Start a watched .NET Core build in the background from the command-line with:

$ dotnet watch run
watch : Started
Hosting environment: Development
Content root path: C:\Users\simon\git\joybox2\joybox2
Now listening on: https://localhost:5001
Application started. Press Ctrl+C to shut down.

In a new terminal window start a watched nuxt dev server build with:

$ yarn dev

Then open http://localhost:3000 in your browser to view your App served directly from Nuxt.js dev server and will proxy all Server requests to ServiceStack Server running on https://localhost:5001.

Disclaimer

Most of the REST API & DB backend code is based on the examples in https://github.com/mjhea0/node-koa-api.
It was of great help to have such a nice template to implement my own requirements.

Notes

Volume control with amixer

amixer cset numid=3,iface=MIXER,name='PCM Playback Volume' 10%

Playback control with omxplayer

omxplayer -o alsa media/one_love.mp3

Other omxplayer options

-l  --pos n                 Start position (hh:mm:ss)
    --no-osd                Do not display status information on screen
    --no-keys               Disable keyboard input (prevents hangs for certain TTYs)