PiTFT Manager

Display manager for framebuffer devices (like the PiTFT) on Raspberry Pi.

What's a display manager?

Simply put, a display manager is an application that provides other applications with access to the display. In practice, this means you can create your own apps for it, switch between apps on the fly, and more!

Why PiTFT?

The Adafruit PiTFT 3.5" is what I'm developing it on/for, so I chose to reference it in the name.

What apps come with it?

• dashboard - displays weather, next calendar event, and next task due
• system - displays system information
• fortune - displays fortune cookies
  • Note: requires fortune-mod to be installed!
• affirmations - displays positive affirmations
• calendar and tasks - display events/tasks from webcal and caldav calendars
• weather - displays the current weather

Creating apps

Creating apps is simple, each app is a Python module that provides an App class, which should inherit from the apps.AbstractApp class. Then you just need to implement the run_iteration method and have it do whatever you want the app to do!

More documentation for development coming soon.

Installation

• First, clone the repository onto the Raspberry Pi, I recommend cloning it to ~/pitftmanager and then change directory into it.
• Second, install the required Python libraries.
• Third, copy the pitftmanager.service file into /etc/systemd/system.
• Fourth, edit the path in /etc/systemd/system/pitftmanager.service to the path where you checked out the code
• Fifth, enable the systemd service.
• Lastly, start the systemd service, or reboot.

Quick command list to install:

git clone https://github.com/tsbarnes/pitftmanager.git ~/pitftmanager
cd ~/pitftmanager
sudo pip3 install -r requirements.txt
sudo cp ~/pitftmanager/pitftmanager.service /etc/systemd/system/
sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/pitftmanager.service  # don't forget to change the path!
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable pitftmanager
sudo systemctl start pitftmanager