Departure board servers (Python)

This repository contains the source code for the Python Departure board servers, which can be plugged into the Python Departure module.

It contains the following board server back ends:

• Pygame,
• SDL2,
• LED matrix, for physical departure boards powered by Raspberry Pi and the Python bindings of the rpi-rgb-led-matrix project.

Installation

On Debian-based Linux (and similarly for other flavours of Linux), for the Pygame back end, make sure the following packages are installed:

$ sudo apt-get install python3-dev libsdl-image1.2-dev libsdl-mixer1.2-dev \
    libsdl-ttf2.0-dev libsdl1.2-dev libsmpeg-dev python-numpy subversion \
    libportmidi-dev ffmpeg libswscale-dev libavformat-dev libavcodec-dev \
    libfreetype6-dev

The SDL2 back end is built on PySDL2: see https://pysdl2.readthedocs.io/en/latest/install.html#prerequisites its prerequisites.

Note – For this back end, before starting the server, make sure that the PYSDL2_DLL_PATH environment directory points to the SDL2 library (e.g. SDL2.dll on Windows) if it's not in the standard library directories.

The Pygame and SDL2 back ends can be installed using:

$ pip install departure-server-pygame
$ pip install departure-server-sdl

These commands will install the prerequired Python packages.

To use the LED matrix back end on a Raspberry Pi with suitable LED matrices (e.g. 3 64x32 matrices), first install the rgbmatrix module as per the instructions, then run:

$ pip install departure-server-led-matrix

Usage

Use the departure-server command to start a board server with a specific back end.

Running the command without an argument will show the available back ends.

$ departure-server

Once the board server has been started, on the client side (e.g. using the departure CLI or the Departure web API server), set the DEPARTURE_BOARD_SERVER environment variable to the IP address or hostname of the server, then start the client.

Here is an image of the board server running the Pygame back end:

About

Written by Sébastien Pujadas, released under the MIT license.