Another thing worth mentioning about Reclaim’s sojourn to OER19 was our trial run of the Pi Video Looper setup that we’ll be rolling out for Ryan Seslow‘s artwork at Domains19. Luckily Meredith got a primer from Tim before making the trip to Galway because I was a bit rusty. The basic idea is you install the Pi Video Looper on a Raspberry Pi and the Pi boots up and automatically loops any video (or videos) loaded within a specific directory. So, you could have a video version of a GIF that loops eternally, which effectively gives you a hi-quality GIF looper, which is what we did for the Be Kind, Reclaim poster Meredith animated in anticipation of OER19. We also included an animation of VHS Tape art as well as a Ryan Seslow’s Vaporwave visual as a teaser. Here’s a look:
Here is a good look @meredithfierro surrounded by @reclaimhostng's groovy digital signage at #OER19 thanks to a few raspberry pi video loopers: pic.twitter.com/1yA3XbDaZd
— Jim Groom (@jimgroom) April 10, 2019
There are two tricks to Pi Video Looper after installing the software (see links below for more on this), one is actually finding the Raspberry Pi on the network, to accomplish this Adafruit’s Raspberry Pi Finder is crucial. You need to do this so you can eventually access the Pi via FTP and add files given there is no GUI for the PI when using Pi Video Looper software. The other trick is actually getting the Pi on the network, which gets doubly complicated when you are using a guest wifi network that requires additional steps. Luckily tethering to the iPhone worked cleanly, and to connect the Pi Video Looper with a specific network you need to add the wpa_supplicant-conf file and reboot so that the network settings are loaded.
Here is what my supplicant file looked like:
country=us
update_config=1
ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
network={
scan_ssid=1
ssid="my iPhone name"
psk="my tethering password"
}
You can see the full installation for the Pi Video Looper here, here are the install commands, here is the latest release of the software on Github, and finally if you need to change read-only permissions of mount drive for Raspberry Pi. [Leaving these links here predominantly for my own future reference, but let me know if you need more explanation.] And, finally, special thanks to Kate Molloy for capturing Reclaim’s video looping presence in all its glory!
I wanted to document how cool the @ReclaimHosting room is at #OER19, so I *tried* to get creative after @amyburvall and @BryanMMathers workshop yesterday. This is my attempt at a gif using the ImgPlay app that Amy suggested. pic.twitter.com/c2LVgb8BN0
— Kate Molloy (@hey_km) April 11, 2019
