We needed a replacement for a dead digital photo frame and decided to use a spare monitor along with a pi zero W instead of purchasing a dedicated digital photo frame device.
Materials:
- pi zeroW
- class 10 microSD card (16Gig)
- small format usb thumb drive
- usb otg to usb A adaptor for the thumb drive
- mini hdmi to std hdmi cable
- power supply or mini USB to your computer’s USB port size cable to power the pi from your machine
- wifi internet access
- a mac/other computer with wifi
Procedure was as follows:
Flash max2play image ( max2play image ) onto the sd card with Etcher (if you’re on a Mac). With max2play their system starts up a private network / accesspoint by default so that you can setup the system easily. *** if there are other max2play installs on the network make sure that you are modifying the correct pi’s install by checking the assigned ip’s or the MAC address. …. there can be conflicts with pi MAC addresses since they are not static, watch out for this ****
After you have burned Max2Play image onto the micro SD card, insert it into the pi zero W
Plug pi zero W into a power source (mini usb power port to usb port in a computer works fine).
Plug usb cable into computer so the pi starts up. After 3-4 minutes you will be able to find a wireless network named max2play. Join it and then open max2play.local in a browser window. This brings you to the max2play config pages.
in the WIFI/LAN tab: click on start scan link to scan for available networks. choose one and enter its password. disable/unclick the Automatic wifi with WPS option. Click Save all Settings button and then got to settings/reboot tab and reboot
After reboot make sure you are connected to the correct pi via max2play.local or explicitly typing in the ip address for the pi.
Goto Settings/Reboot and enter a player name as well as the licensee’s email address for activation. Also set the language and timezone. Click Save settings and you should get a message about your license being activated. At the bottom of the settings/reboot tab you can adjust the plugins… for the photo-frame we are simply using Kodi as well as File system mount so you can remove Jivelite, Squeezebox Server and Audio Player if you’d like. Make sure you save the plugin configurations —> this will remove the extraneous options from the setup tabs.
Next go to the Kodi tab and upgrade Kodi to the latest version…. this will take a while, you’ll get messages telling you what’s going on. Make sure you Select Autostart Kodi (video) and save.
Go to Raspberry Settings tab and choose Disable Bluetooth on RPI3 box (we don’t want bluetooth active). Save settings and reboot.
Now lets add two important plugins: VNC server and SD card Write Protection: goto the bottom of the settings tab and you will see a place to enter the url for additional plug-ins. Add the following:
*****sd card write protection doesn’t seem to work well/ causes hang
http://shop.max2play.com/media/downloadable/currentversion/sdcardprotection.tar
http://shop.max2play.com/media/downloadable/currentversion/vnc.tar
Once you’ve added the VNC Server plugin to to its tab and choose to install vnc server…. once again, this takes a while.
For a different distribution, one which doesn’t setup its own zero conf network, its easiest to turn the pi zero into a headless ethernet device. …. instructions to follow.