Unsplash-DigitalFrame

A little project I made who use the unsplash API to retrieve picture of an account and save them locally on a raspberry PI for a custom digital-frame.

First, save the main script "download_user_unsplash_photos.py" on your desktop and change the line 18 to your account :

this_user = pu.user('YOUR_USERNAME_ON_UNSPLASH', w=100, h=100)

Dependencies

I am using 3 external libraries :

pyunsplash which can be found here : https://github.com/salvoventura/pyunsplash

$ pip install pyunsplash

Request for the request to the unsplash API : https://requests.readthedocs.io/en/master/

$ pip install request

And feh for the slideshow : https://github.com/derf/feh

$ pip install feh

Slideshow

In this project you can found 2 shell script, they will be use via our script to start / restart our slideshow when there is new pictures to load

Create a new folder in :

/home/pi/bin/

This is where you will save the 2 scripts

kill_slideshow script_slideshow

Tips: you can change the number after -D on script_slideshow if you want to slowdown the speed of the slideshow, if you dont touch anything it will change every 3 seconds which can't be rapidly anoying.

Crontab

To automate the task of executing the script, you will need to create a Crontab : For this, open the crontab :

$  crontab -e

And add this line to execute our script it every day at 1am :

$  0 1 * * * python /home/pi/Desktop/download_user_unsplash_photos.py

(consedering I save the script on the Desktop of course)

Setup Auto-start

To start the slideshow when you start the Raspberry you need to :

• Go to : cd /etc/xdg/autostart
• Create the file slideshow_image_changer.desktop :

  - $ sudo nano slideshow_image_changer.desktop 

• (copy / paste the one with the same name on this project)
• Save & Close

Disabled sleep mode

Finally, we have to disabled the sleep mode, for this :

• Edit the kdb config file : sudo nano /etc/kbd/config
• Inside the file, change the BLANK_TIME to 0 (so it never goes blank)
• Still inside the file, change the POWERDOWN_TIME to 0 (so it never automatically shuts off)
• Save & Close

License

unsplash-DigitalFrame is released under the MIT License

If you like this project and you are a curious recruiter, come checkout my portfolio : https://www.philippeoursel.com/