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    2. MerlinElMago
    3. Posts
    A New Chapter for MagicMirror: The Community Takes the Lead
    Read the statement by Michael Teeuw here.
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    • RE: MM on a Raspberry Zero W in 2023

      @sdetweil Thanks for the tip. Will try it, but I’m reasonably happy with my minibrowser because it is not as resource hungry as ff or chromium.

      Looking at your script I see you pass -e Fullscreen -e Navigationbar to the Midori browser, but with those arguments, the address bar would still appear…

      Best regards
      Merlin

      posted in General Discussion
      M
      MerlinElMago
    • MM on a Raspberry Zero W in 2023

      Hello everybody,
      I just set up my MM software on a Raspberry Pi Zero W. You might ask why such an old device in 2023… well there are several reasons for that:
      1st I just had some laying around from past projects and 2nd ( and most important ) the low power draw of the Zero W was just perfect to power it off a USB connection on my monitor, so I did not have to fiddle around with buck converters to power the pi.

      I ran into several problems while installing it, and I just want to share the solutions I found for them.

      ¿RaspberryOS light or full?
      Well, the easiest way is to opt for a full flegded OS, but since the Zero W has so limited capability, I opted for a Light install. So I had to adapt my installation mixing several ( outdated ) installation tutorials I found. In the end, I installed Xorg and openbox manually and start them from my .profile with autologin. After that, I start the browser from whithin my /etc/xdg/openbox/autostart

      Which lightweight browser can I use on the Zero W?
      The quick and easy answer is none. Chromium is not supported anymore on the Zero W ( legacy build is an option though, but segfaults frequently due to the limited amount of ram ); Midory works ok, but I was not able to remove the direction bar from the top, so that did not work either. So in the end, I opted to write a simple “browser” myself with Python Webkit2 bindings. I had to install de following software:
      sudo apt-get install gir1.2-webkit2-4.0 libgtk-3-dev libwebkit2gtk-4.0-dev python3-gi

      After that, the following file did the trick:

      import gi
      gi.require_version("Gtk", "3.0")
      gi.require_version("WebKit2", "4.0")
      from gi.repository import Gtk, WebKit2
      
      class Minibrowser(Gtk.Window):
          def __init__(self):
              Gtk.Window.__init__(self, title="MagicMirror²")
             # The size doesn't actually matter since on the bottom we are going to maximize the window
              self.set_default_size(800, 600)
      
              web_view = WebKit2.WebView()
              web_view.load_uri("http://localhost:8080")
      
              scrolled_window = Gtk.ScrolledWindow()
              scrolled_window.add(web_view)
              self.add(scrolled_window)
              self.fullscreen()
      
      if __name__ == "__main__":
          win = Minibrowser()
          win.connect("destroy", Gtk.main_quit)
          win.show_all()
          Gtk.main()
      

      ¡The boot process is ugly!
      Yes it is and I installed plymouth to make it more attractive. In the end it doen’t actually matter and it even delays de boot for a few seconds, but I like it!
      I installed the plymouth spinfinity theme and made it all black. After that I added splash quiet to the /boot/cmdline.txt file and that was it.

      I hope that this helps a few fellow tinkerers who wish to repurpose their old Zeros.

      Best regards
      Merlin

      posted in General Discussion
      M
      MerlinElMago
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