It’s been 9 busy days

The roll out of the new refactored code for photoframe wasn’t without issue(s) unfortunately.

Most of you saw a functional frame, but some ran into issues where the required rasbian (libturbojpeg progs) were not being installed during the update. I’m still trying to figure out how this happened and if the users were running the sd card image or not.

But for the most part it seems to have worked. A bunch of new features have also been added such as changing the hostname and better error handling for the rewritten USB image handler.

A part of the rewrite would also allow for unit testing. This combined with pyflakes (a lint tool for python) should hopefully minimize regressions seen (such as unicode acting up, etc) since it will allow every build to be tested. The long term goal for this is to migrate to a release branch and make master the development branch (right now, it’s both).

But for now, the next items for photoframe are:

• Get a new SD Card image out there
• On this new image, remove the shutdown printouts and replace it with something more friendly
• Rework the Log Report functionality to be a menu of options, such as launching SSH, enabling more detailed log messages, etc
• Implement service UI

But top of my list is to fix the glaring issue that has annoyed most of us for quite some time, the Google Photos API implementation.

Yes, it turns out I hadn’t fully read the documentation and was caching some URLs which I shouldn’t have. This will cause the frame to think that google photos is out of images, reset the list of shown images and start over. Sometimes this happens within 10 min, other times it takes 10 hours. But it happens, and it’s bad.

Unfortunately (yes, sorry, we all hate hearing that word) it means I need to do some rework of the service API and cache system. The cache system has been relying on the Id of the images, which in most cases is also the URL. This needs to stop since I will now use an actual ID which is a much more sane solution :-)

Either way, I hope to have this fixed THIS WEEK, since it’s been bugging me a lot and I know I’m not the only one.