Scary Pi

Every time i go to Disney theme Parks, I love to visit Haunted Mansion attraction there. First time i really got scared. There is lot of spooky stuff in that haunted mansion. One of the things they like to do in the Haunted Mansion is have these portraits that slowly change from regular people into monsters. That is my inspiration to do this project for this year (2016) Halloween. We assembled this at the entrance of the house where we handout the candy and some kids loved and some got really scared :-).

Step 1: Setting up the Raspberry Pi

To get started you'll need a Raspberry Pi computer. Either the first generation models (A, B, A+, B+) or the second generation Pi 2 will work great. You'll also want a USB stick that will be used to hold videos for playback.

First make sure you've loaded the latest Raspbian operating system on your Raspberry Pi. You can find the OS image download here, instructions for burning to an SD card image here, and a convenient guide here that explains how to load an operating system.

Make sure your Raspberry Pi is connected to the internet, either with a wired connection to its ethernet port, or by setting up wireless access to a WiFi network. Check out the guide on network setup for more details on using wireless and WiFi networks with the Pi.

Once your Raspberry Pi is powered up and connected to a network you can follow the steps below to install the video looper software.

Step 2: Setting up the Video looper

Follow adafruit video looper commands to install video looper on your SD card. This site also has information on how to connect the pi with SSH (remote). This is useful when you want to connect to Raspberry Pi during the video looping. This remote session is useful for disabling the video looping.

Step 3: Setting up the Photo frame 

Attach your picture frame to the front of the monitor using velcro dots or strap.

Step 4: Get your favourite Video

I happened to have AtmosFearFX unliving portraits DVD with me. I ripped the DVD into MP4 format. You can buy this in Amazon or download the digital versions of these videos here.

Download the free Master Gracey changing portrait video found here

Copy your spookiest video to the USB stick using in any of the format mentioned below.

After installation video looper is configured to play movies off of USB drives inserted in the Raspberry Pi. The default video player, omxplayer, can play most videos encoded with the H.264 video codec and in a video format with an extension like .avi, .mov, .mkv, .mp4, or .m4v. You can even play 720p and 1080p movies because omxplayer will use the Pi's GPU (graphics processing unit) to efficiently play videos!

With video looper running if you insert a USB stick a 10 second countdown wil start.

If only one movie is available it will play continually in a loop.If more than one movie is found then each movie will be played in alphabetical order by filename. Once the last movie has played video looper will loop back to the first video and play all videos again in order repeatedly.

For more information on video looping configuraion and disablling video looper check here