I posted this to one of the Run-DMD threads but thought I'd throw it in it's own thread for a wider audience.

Reasons I made this...

1. I was looking for something to do with some excess hardware I had kicking around
2. I had a room that needed a clock
3. Love my Run-DMD clock in the living room so wasn't going to move that
4. Thought the Run-DMD clock could use a "refresh" with modern content!

Code is on git if you want to build one yourself. I would not consider myself a programmer but I can R&D (Rip off duplicate) like nobody's business! Pretty simple stuff, just need an LCD and a Raspberry Pi, Pinball Browser would be helpful if you want to play videos from Spike2 games of course, but it will play any video's you put in the data directory. I'm going to make a little 5" one to sit on my desk I think.

https://github.com/lanapalooza/VideoClock

If anyone wants to contribute to the code knock yourself out... I'd love to have it auto shutdown and restart, but the RPi I believe needs a hardware module to accomplish that to do it slickly. If I had more time I'd love to actually build in more functionality like you find on the Run-DMD, turning individual games or video's off, allowing for 24hr clock or different font's. Even cooler would be to work on a layering solution where you could leverage more of the Stern assets and build out video's and have the time layered between effects.

Thanks! Thought crossed my mind But I don't like the idea of profiting off Stern IP, I'll just give it away for free instead , lol. I'm kidding... I'm not going any where near distributing Stern assets.

You're looking to run the old style DMD dots on an LCD screen? I guess you could do it, if you recorded the animations to mp4, you could drop them in there like any other video. I'm not sure if you can output the DMD animations from PBBrowser as mp4, would be kinda cool if you could. Right now though, it wouldn't be as cool as RunDMD however as I'm using some really simply css and javascript to put the time directly over the video, RunDMD is doing some more clever overlays, where you can see the time behind and in between some of the DMD animations... this could be done too with css and javascript and some video's or animated gif's with transparent backgrounds.

I took a look at this and unless your DMD video's are in a 16:9 aspect ratio then it will take additional code to get it to work nicely, right now the only DMD video's I could find online are all in their native aspect ratio so my code stretches them fill the screen so they won't work. If you found some with lots of black space/padding in them they would work with this without having to adjust any code.

I used an older model RPi3, I do wonder if the Zero would have an enough power to run mp4's smoothly... quick google search makes it sound like it is capable... that would give you a much smaller form factor... My setup was also running ngnix and chromium, so if it can handle all of that overhead it should work... you've got me curious now

The biggest thing I found in the couple I made was the quality of the LCD screens and their viewing angles, any of the ones I had laying around weren't good enough for my liking, so if I were spending money somewhere it would be on the LCD.

Nice! Post some pics if you get a chance!

That’s awesome to hear… I’m a hack… please make it better!

Hear those are tough to find these days… I know it runs on 3 fine.

Good call…. No idea why the world lost their minds over Pi’s during the pandemic… so many other great boards out there. Good luck!!!

Love it! What do you have planned for updates?

I like those ideas!

This is amazing, awesome progress! In don’t have a Le Potatoe but if you make an image available I’ll give it a go when I grab one.

Things to consider
- a UI would be amazing like RunDMD that interacts with button pushes
- Change fonts for time
- Change drop shadows for time
- I liked the weather widget I added at one point
- Does an LE Potatoe have a shutdown/startup functionality? Being able to put it on a timer would be awesome
- Ability to read videos from a folder and a mechanism to exclude/include folders like RunDMD’s ability to turn off games. You’d be able to organize your videos by folder the

I know there are daughter boards for the Pi to perform that function im just not familiar with the LE Potato at all… need to do some googling on it.

With your re-write and no dependency on ngnix anymore have your tried it on the pi-Zero again by chance? The price point and footprint of that board is hard to beat.

I keep thinking form factor and packaging this into something people could assemble easily… like the RunDMD board… the le potato has so much functionality that would go unused… wonder what a custom board would look like… the board would need hdmi out, enough processing power and RAM to run your app, SD card to hold the videos, some inputs for buttons, wifi for updates.

Buttons are a great UI for the right application but naturally a mouse works… if you haven’t lost it and the batteries aren’t dead, it’s another barrier to use but agreed it doesn’t get used much at all in this application. For the last couple of years now I only use the buttons on my RunDMD twice a year… to adjust for time changes, I haven’t changed the content in my display in ages.

As long as pinball browser keeps working though I do see this clock getting more frequent updates… though those won’t happen at the actual clock… it would be nice to push files to it wirelessly over the network so you don’t have to take the SD card in and out… add that to the list of features . Also if you could sync your time to a server that’d be cool then you’d never need to update the time.

If I’m not mistaken your code should all run fine on a RPi too right? You’re not using anything Potato specific?

Well... that took some work to get going, but it's going and it's cool!

My struggles:

- I followed the Next.js instructions and installed the demo app, but named it pinscreen, so when I cloned your project I had to put it in another director, yarn dev worked fine on the demo app but not on yours, kept getting an error.
- So I copied over all the code form your project over my demo app and then yarn dev worked but threw an error saying I needed sass installed
- That of course failed when I ran npm install sass and I needed to run npm install --legacy-peer-deps sass
- Once I got passed that I was getting another error: FATAL ERROR: Ineffective mark-compacts near heap limit Allocation failed - JavaScript heap out of memory
- When I ran node -e 'console.log(v8.getHeapStatistics().heap_size_limit/(1024*1024))' it reported back 236.75, so I ran export NODE_OPTIONS="--max-old-space-size=5120" and now when I run the previous command I get 1030
- Now it runs!

Now to have the pi to run this on start-up and then launch a browser that goes to localhost:3000

After playing with some different fonts... I still like the one I was using originally... Poppins... I gotta see if I can figure out how to add that back in... love your work!

Edit: I figured out how to add Poppins back in there! Easy peasy

- This AHK... how can I get it? I just now realized I nuked my old machine that had the video's I had pulled from PBBrowser and I've let my PBBrowser license expire So I have no more video's... I really liked his pay one price model he had before, I understand the change in the model... with all the additional work he has taken on to keep up with Stern nerfing his app. If I'm going to pay for the license again I might as well rip all the video from all the games and be done with it.

Just looking at your list of to-do's, thought this one was on there, but I don't see it now, is there anyway to add more then videos... images with transparency's is what I'm thinking, in layers where the time is between the assets? RunDMD has some great animations where the time component is a part of the animation... and the Stern games have great static assets that could be leveraged for this. I know when I ripped all the video's out of AIQ, a lot of the scenes on the display aren't all video's.

Curious to see how you implemented a turn on/off feature… on PC i get that but were you able to figure that out on the Le Potatoe?

Right… that’s what you said… sorry, forgot about that.

Just grabbed the latest code, love the addition of the drop shadow... I understand you're wrapping things up, really appreciate you taking on the re-write, you've just nailed everything I was hoping this could be. I have two more requests you are welcome to ignore

To make things more update-able by a laymen... would it be possible to have the app read the fonts folder and add any new entries to the font-definitions.scss file automagically? This would limit users to only having to create a folder and transfer files, easier steps than editing a file.

My testing tells me the following:
Create directories and add video files to /public/videos
Click Import Videos - This will add the new folders and videos
Click Re-Sync Video List - This will now allow you to see the new video's you've just added by clicking Import Videos
Open File Details - Displays the folders within /public/videos and clicking the folder expands the list showing the individual video's
Possible to add check-boxes next to the Folder names and File names, to allow users to easily get videos or games out of the rotation

As an aside, I've found some pretty cool video's from the Visual Pinball scene for the old Bally/Williams titles, topper videos is what they are called and they look pretty great to add more variety to clock.

Documentation is good, I would suspect my level, as limited as it is, is well above average joe's level, I can't see average Joe adding fonts, ultimately, I'm not sure who is going to use this beyond you and I at this point so I totally get that the juice isn't worth the squeeze, very much a go to catch phrase of mine so I get it. Nice workaround on the stern sd cards... I still haven't re-up'd by PBBrowser license yet.

I need to find a better LCD to build this with, the little 5" one I've got is cute and all but to really make this thing look nice you need a good LCD, with a small-ish controller, ideally it would be housed altogether in a frame that isn't too thick with one power cable running out of it.

No stuttering to report on the RPi3 Model 3, which one were you having a hard time with though? I'd like to try that one, right now I'm only running the video's you've got in the Repo.

I am currently running one of those crappy little RPi touchscreen LCD's, the viewing angle on it and the brightness are for the birds. Did you get in on the group buy for the better IPS displays for your R&M? I remember seeing a thread of people updating theirs. I should look into that.

Every thing is working really great @daveyvandy... I'll see if I can get a nice frame together and get a half decent LCD in it... the links you provided are a good starting point for sure. Really want to see this running off one power cable, we will see what I can come up with, in the meantime here is a quick video of my setup running on the RPi3... made a couple of updates to your GUI, adding upper and lower case AM/PM/am/pm options as well as adding Poppins font.

https://vimeo.com/816771225

Doh…. That video is my mac safari running the app off the Pi… will check it on the Pi itself.

Got the topper videos in my capture from here… https://forums.gameex.com/forums/files/category/44-topper-videos/ they don’t have many… but I paid for the PinballX a while ago so I looked there first.

VPUniverse has a ton of them though… not sure on quality…
https://vpuniverse.com/files/category/160-topper-videos/

Well... that didn't go too well... with the overhead of the desktop GUI... everything chugs on the RPi 3. I'm going to install Raspian Lite on it and just run Chromium in Kiosk and see if it will run any better.

I was running yarn dev, but was looking to move to a build, will do that now! Just nuking my Pi now and reinstalling .

That was another huge pia... lol...

It is all up and running now natively on the Pi... and your default videos all look to be running well... I've also got the app starting up and chromium launching in kiosk so it's pretty much good to go now.

Question for you... are you saving the settings locally? I found /store/settings.ts but when I ran it locally on the Pi didn't get the same settings as my browser on my Mac was using. I had to save them again on the Pi.

I had to install more "stuff" as Raspian Lite... as the name would suggest didn't have a bunch of stuff I needed, here are the steps I took and the guides I followed.

1. Install Raspian Lite, XServer, Openbox and Chromium following the directions here step by step (Note the openbox configuration step and change 'http://your-url-here' to 'localhost:3000'): https://die-antwort.eu/techblog/2017-12-setup-raspberry-pi-for-kiosk-mode/
2. Install Node.js following these directions https://pimylifeup.com/raspberry-pi-nodejs/
3. Install Yarn following these directions https://classic.yarnpkg.com/lang/en/docs/install/#mac-stable
4. Install Git following these directions https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Getting-Started-Installing-Git
5. Setup SSH keys for Git following these directions https://pimylifeup.com/raspberry-pi-ssh-keys/
6. Install Next.JS default project project following these directions https://nextjs.org/docs
7. Clone the repo with this command git clone [email protected]:davidvanderburgh/pinscreen.git
8. Install sass: npm install --legacy-peer-deps sass
9. Update memory on node.js (I lowered this from previous attempt with the thought that not utilizing more memory would help things run better in Chromium): export NODE_OPTIONS="--max-old-space-size=640"
10. Install pm2 to autostart the app: yarn global add pm2
11. Run the app to make sure things are working: yarn dev
12. Run the build process: yarn build
13. From the folder where you have the code run the following command to run the app in the background: pm2 start npm --name pinscreen -- start
14. Add the pm2 process to your startup sequence (Note the output of this command and copy and paste it and run it to actually add it): pm2 startup
15. Make sure Chromium has been added to your startup from way back in step 1 and reboot and bob is your uncle!

Also worth noting... when in Chromium with your mouse pointer disabled it can be a real pain to use the menu Ctrk-Alt-Backspace will shutdown XServer and Chromium and you can restart it without the no cursor switch... starts --

I'll take the no cursor switch off my chromium launch if that is the case, save having to restart chromium to make changes that'll be handy. I haven't tried a many different videos yet, need to get a better monitor first before I re-up my pbbrowser license and start ripping at scale. I'll take a look at that later. Things are working really well though, very pleased with it all.

I’ll give it a try on the Pi!

Nice! Your dad has a killer lineup!

Looks like your running the PI desktop... that has to have some overhead associated with it too, no? I'm running mine from Pi Lite with only xserver and chromium running... with the understanding that it should be using less resources... thank a full Pi install using the default desktop.

Are you running this from

No I’m using a Pi but saw pi stuff on your desktop so thought it may just be a raspian install… which has a lite version.

I love everything you've done, so amazing! My experience with those small Pi LCD's have always been poor, sample size of 3 different ones mind you, but the viewing angles have sucked and the colours in general very washed out, low contrast. If you like this one let us know cause I think the form factor is perfect for desktop.

Possible to tweak your above logic? If user sets video to x seconds all videos play for x seconds I like that as it stops long videos from dominating, but if a video is < x seconds can it end rather than loop? In your demo video above you've got a short video in there that is looping and it looks janky... I think it'd look better moving to the next video.

The functionality to remove games is perfect, love it!

As long as it can never make it into the corner like the DVD Logo .

Additional widgets could be cool to add... I had added a weather widget to the original clock I made and thought some people may like that...

I was using the widget from weathered.com.

That turned out really nice! Can't remember are you running a Pi or a Potatoe?