Setup Instructions

First Thing's First

Openframe is just starting out. This is a no-frills setup guide geared towards users with RPi experience.

We'll be continuing to improve the documentation and guides as we move forward, and things will continue to change... stay tuned!

Setup

Setting up a display to be an openframe is fairly easy (and we will continue to make it easier!).

Dependencies

The plan is to stick all the necessary deps into an install.sh script that will automate the setup. For now, we're documenting here.

First, install node. Following the guide from Adafruit:

$ curl -sLS https://apt.adafruit.com/add | sudo bash
$ sudo apt-get install node

On Linux, install chromium. For the Raspberry Pi running Debian:

$ sudo apt-get install chromium

You can also use Chromium on the mac if you want -- download the Chromium app and put it in your Applications directory. Then you can use the -c flag to start the app in Chromium (it will open in kiosk mode on a new desktop).

Installation

From the command line, clone this repo and cd into the root of the project.

$ git clone https://github.com/OpenFrameProject/OpenFrame-NodeClient.git
$ cd OpenFrame-NodeClient

Install the npm dependencies.

$ npm install

You should now be able to run the client.

Usage

NOTE: The frame.js script run below uses xinit to start an xserver windows session. You cannot run the script while logged into the linux desktop environment -- instead, you must run the script from the main linux command line interface. If your RPi is setup to boot to the desktop environment, log out to the command line before running the following commands. (In other words, don't try to run the following from a terminal window within the desktop environment, or you'll get an error.)

$ node frame.js -u username -f framename [-d domain] [-c] [-r]

As an example, to start up the frame for user jonwohl, with a server at openframe.io:

$ node frame.js -u jonwohl -f Home -d openframe.io

The presence of the -c flag will force the system to try to open the frame using Chromium instead of whatever the default browser is. At present, on linux Chromium is a required dependency, and will be used regardless of the -c flag.

The presence of the -r flag will reset the frame, causing the server to treat it as if it is an entirely new frame.