GIF display advice

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Hi All, I am after advice on building a small colour GIF displayer.

The parameters of what I am trying to do are:

Display a chosen GIF stored on the device.
Be scalable, so work with a display from 7 down to 2.8.
Use wifi
It can be plugged in for power.

My preference would be to use a Raspberry Pi Zero as I have a spare one, but other options are possible.
I am confident putting things together but have little programming experience, though willing to learn in this area.

Does anyone have any ideas they are willing to share?

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Hi Andrew,

This has definitely been done before, the people over at Adafruit love this kind of project.

This bit is hard, there are 2 parts to this that I can see:

  • Scaling the gif. Perhaps a heavy image library like imagemagick would do the trick
  • Supporting multiple displays, Displays for microcontrollers/microprocessors have widely varying display interfaces (HDMI, I2C, HUB75, SPI, DSI to name the ones I know), so making a platform that supports common ones would be quite hard, you’d probably need to make some kind of “installer” that let the user select their screen from a list. Would require quite a lot of programming skill IMO.

As far as wifi and plug in power, these aren’t hard, pretty much every dev board these days is happy with USB or barrel jack power. Wifi probably restricts you to a Pi for ease of use, perhaps something like the ESP32 or Pico W would work but their network stacks are more finicky than linux.

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Wouldn’t it be easier to auto-define a display? User may not know the exact name of his display. And this can lead to an error.
Hi all.

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Thanks for the responses on this. I have been going through some online projects people have done for similar things. Once I have it running, I will post a pic of it in all its glory. Cheers.