Quick outline of project:
I wanted a display in my home to show poster artwork of movies playing in cinemas of my choosing; they would continously scroll through until I approach it & a proximity sensor (TBC) detects me, pauses the scroll & displays relevant information of the movie that it's paused on. When I walk away, the information dissapears & begins scrolling through the artwork again. The final solution will run on a Raspberry Pi, connected to a HDMI display (housed in a frame) & a proximity sensor.
The system is broken down into 2 parts:
- The backend - a python script that:
- takes user inputted cinema names (e.g. "Alamo Drafthouse Brooklyn"), currently specified in cinema.py
- locates the official establishment names & corresponding ZIP codes using Google places API
- uses the ZIP codes & official names to find movie showtimes via webscraping IMDB (I know it's not great, but I am looking for suitable alternatives)
- Groups movie data by cinemas playing, rather than movies playing at each cinema (removes duplicates)
- Locates corresponding poster artwork urls for each movie using MovieDB API
- Outputs a json file for further processing by front end SW called "movieData.txt"
- The frontend - (currently) a Processing sketch that:
- Reads the generated json file
- Downloads artwork using the URLs
- Renders artwork & information (when activated) on screen
- Detects user input to activate information (currently pressing the space bar, but eventually will be a proximity sensor)
- Animates transisitons between posters & active/inactive information states
- Checks for updates periodically
TO DO:
- Incorporate proximity sensor into processing sketch
- Find more efficient alternative to Processing (Pygame, etc. doesn't play well with Mac OS Mojave at the moment...)
- Make setting cinemas easier for user (perhaps use an Evernote/OneNote page)