ACTIVE DEVELOPMENT - RELEASE IN A COUPLE OF WEEKS (this line will be removed)

Basic usage

The Display server is a Raspberry Pi system for document display. Documents sent to the Display system will be shown on the LCD screen.

One easy way to send a document is by remote copy:

scp NE555Timer.pdf Display@Display01:NE555Timer.pdf 

Once copied, the file "NE555Timer.pdf" will pop up on the RasPi display as if opened by the user.
 

Even easier usage

We can reduce typing by using an alias:

export D01IP="IP-address-of-display01"
export D01PW="password-for-display01"
alias d01="sshpass -p $D01PW scp $1 Display@$D01IP:$1"

Now we can just type "D01 <some file>" and the file will magically appear on the remote display system:

d01 NE555Timer.pdf

Multiple Display servers can be used to display multiple documents. This can useful while assembling projects - you can display datasheets, schematics, cheat sheets, or anything useful as reference:

d01 NE555Timer.pdf
d03 Schematic.jpg
d03 GPIOPinout.jpg

For this, you will need to build and configure multiple display servers. For example, each display server will need your wifi ID ans password to be visible on your local network.

Building and configuring a Display server are described in later sections.

Shared Directories

You can access the Display server by mounting it as a shared directory.

How to do that is explained in another section. For now, let's assume that we have three display servers mounted as /mnt/Display01, /mnt/Display02, and /mnt/Display03.

Looking at /mnt/Display01 we see the following:

> ls /mnt/Display01
bin  NE555Timer.pdf  NE592VideoAmp.pdf

> ls /mnt/Display01/bin
Paste Screenshot Watch

>

The remote directory contains two files previously copied, and a "bin" directory. In bin we see three commands: "Paste", "Screenshot", and "Watch".

Screenshot will take a screenshot of your current window and send it to the display server as an image. When attached to a keyboard key it will allow you to display windows that aren't file documents.

Suppose you attach the screenshot command to "Ctrl-Alt-Print Scrn" on your keyboard. Now when you're working on a Kicad schematic you can simply press Ctrl-Alt-Print Scrn and have that schematic appear on the Display server.

Pretty neat, huh?

Pasting files

Another operation you can attach to a key is "Paste", which will paste the selected file to the Display server. This acts just like "pasting" a file in your file manager, except that the file goes to the Display server.

Watching files

You can also use the "Watch" command to monitor when a file changes. When the command detects that the monitored file has changed, it automatically copies the new file to the Display server.

Suppose you "Watch" an .html file on the local system:

> /mnt/Display01/bin/Watch    index.html  &
Watching index.html for changes...

>

Now open the file in an editor, and every time the file is saved the changed output will be shown on the Display server.

Also neat, right?

Multiple Display Servers

By default the commands will put files in the directory "one up" from where the executable is.

If you copy the executables to a local directory that won't work so in that case you can use the "target-dir" option to explicitly set the destination.

This example shows how to Screenshot to a specific DisplayServer, using a copy of the command on the local system:

> ~/bin/Screenshot  --target=/mnt/Display02