My eldest graduated high school this year and, to celebrate, the wife and I threw her a graduation party. I’ll spare you the to-dos and checklists for throwing a graduation party–I left those largely to my wife as it is. Instead, I’d like to focus this post on the media aspects of the party.

I’m a big proponent of taking pictures and videotaping those magic moments–and even mundane moments–throughout the lives of your children and family. So, I figured this was the perfect time to pull out those embarrassing pictures and video from the past so that all her friends could see.

For the party, we rented an outdoor facility at a local park. We would have access to electricity and I decided to bring two large flat screen monitors to display the media, but I did not want to bring along expensive laptops or desktops to play the media as I didn’t want to risk damaging that equipment. So, what to do? I know: run my media on cheap Raspberry Pis!

The Slideshow

For my picture slideshow, I pulled out about 700 pictures I had of my child from over the years. However I was going to run the slideshow, I knew I wanted to show the pictures in chronological order. So, I came up with this quick PowerShell script to rename the pictures in increasing numbers so that sorting the pictures alphabetically would effectively sort them chronologically:

$pics = gci "C:\grad_party\data\*" | sort {$_.LastWriteTime}

$count = 0
foreach($pic in $pics){
    $count = $count + 5
    mv $pic.FullName ("C:\grad_party\data\{0}{1}" -f ($count), $pic.Extension)
}

(I increased the count by 5 with each loop so that I could easily, manually reorder pictures if needed.)

Now the big question was, on a Raspberry Pi, what are my options to run a snazzy slideshow?

feh

feh is a linux utility for displaying images and its relatively easy to get it started on a Raspberry Pi. The challenge I encountered was getting it to do anything else other than hard transitions from slide to slide. Ideally, I want a slideshow where the slides are in motion and have nice cross-fade transitions: something like this. I don’t know if feh has those capabilities, but I certainly couldn’t get it to inject those effects, so I continued my search.

Python and Pi3D

A solution using Python?! Tell me more! I happened upon a post from TheDigitalPictureframe.com that used a home-grown Python script leveraging a package called Pi3D. The demo video looked close to the solution I was pursuing, so I gave it a try. Unfortunately, despite all the parameter tweaking I tried, I just couldn’t get the final product I wanted. Nevertheless, I would like to circle back someday and do some more experimentation with this approach.

Make the slideshow myself

In the end, I simply used PowerDirector–the software I use to make my annual family movies–to make a video of my slideshow. Then, I just dropped the video on the Raspberry Pi and played it with the built in VLC Player. I even set VLC to continuously loop the video and set the player to full screen to take up the entire monitor. It worked out pretty well and even garnered a few compliments.

The video montage

On a second flat screen monitor and second Raspberry Pi, I played a video montage of nearly 18 years of video highlights of my child’s life. As I’ve been making annual family movies for most of my daughter’s life, it was pretty easy collecting a few minutes of video of her from each year. Here again, I turned to PowerDirector for my solution. I spliced together the video from over the years separating each year with a “year” title and then created a single mp4 video that I copied to my Raspberry Pi and played with VLC player. Like the slideshow, it turned out pretty well.

Background music

“Dad, your music is too old!”

the kid

For the party background music, I pulled out my reliable portable speaker. Initially, my plan was to copy a bunch of my mp3 files to a third Raspberry Pi, play those files with VLC player, and run the audio out into my speaker. Then, the kid complained that my music was too old.

As an Amazon Prime member, I get access to lots of free music. So, I downloaded a few “modern pop” playlists to my phone. My speaker is bluetooth enabled, so I paired my phone to my speaker and then just played those playlists from my phone through the speaker. That worked out pretty well and I was surprised that both my speaker and phone batteries outlasted the three hour party.

So, there are your media suggestions for your child’s graduation party:

  1. Create a slick slideshow “video” and run it from a Raspberry Pi into a large flat screen monitor,
  2. Create a video montage “video” and do the same thing on a second monitor and Pi, and
  3. Download some music for offline play to your phone and bluetooth your phone to a nice, portable speaker.

The slideshow and video all presume that you’re actively photographing and videoing all your family activities. I highly recommend you do that: family vacations, basketball games, and banquets might feel mundane now but they’ll be gold at your child’s graduation party and beyond.