Infoscreensaver for Raspberry Pi

Document version: 0.1; created 2013-10-04; last modified 2014-02-26.

I use a RPi mainly as a music box in the kitchen. I have a MPD running, controlled via gMPC on the local display and MPDroid from any Android device in my local WLAN.

What was missing was a way of displaying the current song in big letters on the local screen. Then I found some XScreensavers that call a program and simply display the text output of that program in various fashions. So I wrote a python script to fetch the data of the current song from MPD. Then I added system information (cpu load, load average, meminfo)... and some weather data from openweathermap.org.

I put the script on github (direct download).

The photos show the "Phosphor" and the "StarWars" screensaver displaying the output text from my script. You could use any other xscreensaver that displays text from a program ("Apple2", "FlipText", ...) but Phosphor has the best performance while being completely readable.

The GL screensavers need software rendering via libgl1-mesa-swx11, and that is slooow... I need GL:ES Screensavers instead of GLX. Or hardware-accelerated GLX on the RPi.