Customising MMM-Wallpaper to remotely control wallpapers

[aderoks]

I don’t know whether anyone has already done this, but just wanted to share with you something which I have created.

So, I have been using the MMM-Wallpaper module and changing up the sources to find some other wallpapers and I found that I liked the firetv source best. I tried reddit sources, but those tended to contain many personal photos and not quality wallpapers. But after a few months, I found that only the same wallpapers were being repeated, so I dug into the code, and found, as of course, many of you perhaps know as well, there is a fixed cache of firetv wallpapers which are cycled through, and even though the list is long, it’s still finite.

So I started thinking about how can I get more wallpapers for my magic mirror. I knew that there is one custom option in the module which would let me use my own images through a specific folder that I specify in the config. So I started creating a background application that will scrape a wallpaper website, download many wallpapers into a particular location and then, as the config is pointing to that folder, the wallpapers would be new.

But that would mean that I had to go into my raspberry Pi, run the script manually, perhaps changing the wallpaper genre as well to get new wallpapers. So, I made a basic Android app as well with just a drop-down and a submit button. The app, when started, would query my background application in the pi for the list of genres in the site, and populate them in the drop-down. Then, when I select a genre and click submit, it automatically scrapes that particular genre in the wallpaper site, downloads the wallpapers and in the next refresh cycle, the new wallpapers would appear.

How do you like my concept?