I made some changes to Brandon Withrow's Waveshare-version TV build.
The Waveshare 2.8" screen has capacitive touch that wasn't used in the original
build. I added a simple touch.py job to listen to screen events and send a
handful of commands to the video player. Be sure to add a corresponding systemd
service.
You can:
- Touch left side of screen - seek back 30 seconds
- Touch middle of screen - play / pause
- Touch right side of screen - seek forward 30 seconds
- Swipe from left to right - next video
- Swipe from right to left - previous video
It's much easier to manage the videos when they are on a separate FAT partition on the SD Card. Rather than copying over the network or mounting another thumb drive, the card can be plugged in to a normal computer and files can be copied to a mounted partition.
After initially flashing Raspbian (and editing config.txt, etc) but before first boot, which will auto-resize partition to take up all the remaining free space, create a new fat32 partition at the END of the free space. But still leaving enough room for the original linux partition to grow. I left 10GB. This was done using Gparted on a separate linux machine.
Later, once the RPpi is up and you are logged in, you can manually resize the ext4 partition, via something like:
# Resize the ext4 / partition
sudo parted
> print
> resizepart 2 8G
> <ctrl-D>
# Extend the ext4 filesystem to fill up the partitioned space.
df -h
blkid
sudo resize2fs /dev/mmcblk0p2
df -h
Finally, auto-mount the videos data partition at /video
sudo mkdir /video
Then add the following line to /etc/fstab
/dev/mmcblk0p3 /video vfat defaults 0 2
Used the newer RPi Zero 2W. This was mostly a drop-in replacement.
I attempted to use a 64-bit version Debian Bookworm, but couldn't properly get it to work. The screen worked using the newer Waveshare screen overlay setup, but it took control of the GPIO pins needed for the audio circuit. So I continued to use the 32-bit Buster OS.
I also glued in the screen upside down, since the bezel was better covered by
the 3d printed housing that way. To invert the screen, set display_rotate=3 in /boot/config.txt
Switched from Micro-USB to USB-C for the power input. Use something like this Adafruit USB Type-C breakout board. Make sure the breakout board has CC resistors that properly indicate 5 volts--otherwise this won't work with C-to-C cables.
Because I was originally experimenting 64-bit Bookwork, I couldn't use omxplayer since it was no longer provided with that distribution. Instead I found MPV to be a great replacement, and ended up using it for my touch screen scripting as well.
sudo apt install mpv
The player python script is replaced by a much simpler start.sh script.