Setup

Designed for the Roku PhotoBridge HD Digital Media Player

Setup/Use

Application Installation:

After you have downloaded the .zip file containing the application, you will need to unzip it into either a directory on a shared drive or onto a Flash Memory card. If you are using a Flash Memory card, I would recommend that it be 128Mb or greater. This will be plenty of space for any applications that you would want to install on it but it will also allow you to have room to create a 64Mb swap file if necessary. See the end of this page for details on creating a swap file.

Roku also has a support page entitled 'Copying Files From Your PC To A Memory Card' which should be of some assistance if you using any type of Flash Memory card to store applications and/or images on. When using a Flash Memory card, the card does have to remain inserted into the PhotoBridge in order for the applications and images to be accessed.

NOTE:

Make sure that the 'Use folder names' option is checked when the file is unzipped so that the 'images' folder is created and all of the image files are copied to this folder.

Installing the application to use it as a screen saver...

If you want to use this application as your screen saver, then the only thing different that needs to be done is to copy the application and it's associated image directory into a directory called ScreenSavers, which needs to be located at the root level of a mounted Compact Flash card or a network share. This will allow you to choose it as the screen saver from the Roku Setup screen.

When it is started in this mode, it will automatically switch between each location's forecasted data screen every 10 seconds until any button is pressed on the remote. At that time, the application will simply shutdown.

This mode can also be enabled if the application is passed the '-saver' parameter at the command line.

NOTE:

This feature really isn't designed to be a real screen saver that would normally vary the displayed image to prevent damaging some types of displays. Instead it is a way to continuously cycle between each of your defined locations until stopped by pressing any button on your remote.

Setting The Data Format:

By default, the current conditions and forecasted data are displayed in standard English Units. You can change the default to Metric Units by pressing the INFO button on your remote when viewing the main screen. The following popup box will then be displayed in the center of your screen. Pressing the LEFT or RIGHT arrow buttons will cycle between Standard or Metric Units. When your have selected your choice, press SELECT to save it and return to the main screen. The displayed data will be updated using the selected format and the setting will be stored and used the next time that the application is started.

Selecting A Specific Location:

If you have more than 1 location defined, pressing the FAST FORWARD button will display the following popup box which will allow you to jump to a specific location faster than single stepping through each of the locations in between. While this window is displayed, pressing the LEFT, RIGHT, REWIND or FAST FORWARD buttons will cycle over each of your defined locations. Pressing the SELECT button will refresh the screen with the selected location's data or pressing the EXIT button will simply close the popup window.

Zooming In/Out On The Radar Image Screen:

When you press the ROTATE button to switch to viewing the radar screen, the default image that is displayed is the 600 Mile Doppler Radar image. By pressing the ZOOM IN and ZOOM OUT buttons, you can view the 300 Mile Doppler Radar image or an image which covers the entire U.S.

NOTES:

This feature is not available for foreign locations which are limited to satellite images only.
The 300 Mile Doppler Radar image may not be available for some locations within the U.S.

Adding Locations:

This application will allow you to add up to 10 locations from around the world that you can monitor the weather for. To add a new location, begin by pressing the MENU button when viewing the main screen. You will see the following popup window displayed in the middle of your screen.

Using the LEFT, RIGHT, UP, DOWN and SELECT buttons on your remote, you can enter either the zip code or spell the name of the city that you want to add to the list of locations. This can be any city in the world but cities outside of the U.S. are limited to just the major cities that The Weather Channel has defined in their database.

When you have entered the zip code or city name, select the SEARCH button to begin the search for the city containing the specified zip code or all of the cities which have the same name as the one that you entered. If successful, you will see the following popup window which will allow you to choose a specific city.

Now, using the UP, DOWN or ZOOM IN and ZOOM OUT buttons, highlight the specific city that you want added and then press the SELECT button. This will add the city to the locations list and close the popup window. Or press the EXIT button to just close the popup window without making a choice from the list. You can now press the EXIT button if you have completed adding locations. All changes to the list of locations will be saved when you close the main setup window.

Deleting Locations:

To delete a location, begin by pressing the MENU button on your remote which will open the 'Setup' window. Then press the FAST FORWARD button to shift focus from the keyboard to the list of locations on the right. At this time you should see the first location in the list highlighted as shown in the following image.

Now, using the UP, DOWN or ZOOM IN and ZOOM OUT buttons, highlight the specific city that you want to delete then press the SELECT button. You will see the following popup window displayed which will allow you to confirm that you want to delete the selected city from the locations list. Pressing the LEFT or RIGHT arrow buttons will cycle between No or Yes. When your have made your choice, simply press the SELECT button on your remote.

You can now press the EXIT button if you have completed making your changes or press the FAST REWIND button to switch focus back to the keyboard. This will allow you to begin to enter a new location. All changes to the list of locations will be saved when you close the main setup window.

Adding Additional Background Images:

WeatherSix can support up to 10 locations and in addition, can switch the background image to any one of up to 10 different images. But....In order to do so, a swap file will need to be created. Without a swap file, the application will cause the PhotoBridge to lockup while loading the second image because it will run out of useable memory.

I will create a second download which will contain just some additional background images for you to use if you are able to create a swap file and want the background image to change as you cycle through each location. After downloading, unzip the images into the 'images' directory where you have installed the main application.

Background_00

Or, you can create your own images and have them loaded by the application. They need to be .PNG files sized to 1024 x 576 pixels with a filename in the format of 'Background_xx.png' where 'xx' = '00' through '09'. WeatherSix will look for any file in the 'images' directory matching the specified format and will load each one as needed. It is not necessary to have the filenames sequential and the first one is not required to start at '00'.

Again, a swap file is needed for this feature to work.

Creating A Swap File:

Swap space is a generic term for "disk storage used to increase the amount of apparent memory available on the system". You can read more details about the use of swap space here if you like.

The following steps detail the creation of a 64Mb swap file on a 64Mb or larger Compact Flash card which is inserted into the front slot of your PhotoBridge. Although this is an optional procedure, it is recommended that you do create this swap file to prevent lockups as well as other issues which can occur due to low available memory.

Step 1 - Run the Telnet application to connect to the PhotoBridge. To do this, open a DOS window and at the DOS prompt, type in 'telnet' followed by a space and then the IP address for your PhotoBridge. The IP address is found at the top of the screen when you go into Setup mode on the PhotoBridge. For example...

C:/>telnet 192.168.8.17

You should then see something like the following...

(none) login:

Type 'root' (without the quotes and all lower case as you see here) for the login name and hit return.
Afterwards, you should see the root shell prompt (the pound symbol)...

(none) login: root
#

If a mistake is made and you get a 'Login incorrect' message, just hit the enter key until you again see the '(none) login:' prompt and type 'root' and hit the enter key.

Step 2 - You should now be able to enter Linux commands. As a test, try entering the 'pwd' command. If you are successful, you should see the current working directory displayed as shown in the following example...

# pwd
/mnt/flash0/home/root
#

Step 3 - If you haven't yet inserted a Compact Flash card into the front slot on the PhotoBridge, then do so now and enter the Linux 'mount' command which, as the command suggests, mounts the Compact Flash card so that it can be accessed.

# mount /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1 /mnt/flash1 -o remount,rw,sync

Step 4 - Now enter the Linux 'dd' command which will create an empty 64Mb file on the Compact Flash card called 'swapfile'.

Note: Be aware that this may take a few minutes to complete.

# dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/flash1/swapfile bs=1024 count=65536

Step 5 - Next, enter the Linux 'mkswap' command which converts the newly created file into a Linux swap file.

# mkswap /mnt/flash1/swapfile

Step 6 - The last step is to enable this swap file. Enter the Linux 'swapon' command to do this.

# swapon /mnt/flash1/swapfile

NOTES:

If you reboot your PhotoBridge, you will need to repeat steps 1, 3 and 6.

If you want to use another type of removable Flash Memory card other than a Compact Flash card, you will need to modify the previous instructions and change all references of '/mnt/flash1' to one of the following...

# mount /dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun1/part1 /mnt/flash2 -o remount,rw,sync,noatime,nodiratime

Note:

If you want to create a swap file on an shared network drive, then Dave Dodge has detailed the procedure on his web site at http://www.dododge.net/roku/nbd.html

Additional Notes:

Roku has created a web page dealing with low memory issues:

You can access their web page at http://www.rokulabs.com/support/technote-hang.php. Within it there is an 'Advanced' section containing a subsection entitled 'Creating A Swap File' with a link to a script called 'Swap.roku' which is shown below. Go to their web site to read about it's purpose as well as instructions on how to install it.

#!/bin/sh
mount /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1 /mnt/flash1 -o remount,rw,sync,noatime,nodiratime
swapfilename="/mnt/flash1/swapfile"
if [ -e "$swapfilename" ]
then
  echo "Swap file $swapfilename found";
else
  echo "Swap file $swapfilename not found, creating"
  dd if=/dev/zero of="$swapfilename" bs=1024 count=65535
  if [ "$?" -eq 0 ]
  then
   echo "Swapfile created successfully!"
  else
   echo "Failed to create swapfile"
   exit 1;
  fi
fi
grep "$swapfilename" /proc/swaps
if [ -e "/proc/swaps" -a "$?" -eq 0 ]
then
  echo "Swap already on"
else
  echo "Turning swap on..."
  mkswap "$swapfilename"
  swapon "$swapfilename"
fi
exit 0

In addition, an optional way of loading the application:

The following script was suggested by Don Woodward of Roku. The intent here is to always have the swap file automatically loaded before running the application.

After creating the swap file as described above, rename 'WeatherSix.roku' to 'WeatherSix.rxxe'. And then download and save this script as 'WeatherSix.roku'. After you have completed this, anytime that you select the 'WeatherSix' application from the PhotoBridge on-screen applications menu, you will really be executing this shell script which mounts the Compact Flash card as read/write, enables the swap file and then executes the 'WeatherSix' application.

NOTE:

The assumptions with this script are that you have installed the 'WeatherSix' application in the root directory of the Compact Flash card and that you have created a swap file called 'swapfile' on that same Compact Flash card. If you have installed the application in another location or have created the swap file differently, then this script will have to be edited to reflect the configuration differences before it is used.

#! /bin/sh
mount /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1 /mnt/flash1 -o remount,rw,sync,noatime,nodiratime
swapon /mnt/flash1/swapfile
/mnt/flash1/WeatherSix.rxxe "$1"

Also...I thought that I would include some good information/advice from Dave Dodge...

If you've got the PhotoBridge set up completely live on the Internet, without at least a firewall router in the way to block incoming telnet sessions from the outside world, you should probably set root (and guest) passwords. One easy way to do this is to telnet to the PhotoBridge as root and do the following:

# ln -s /bin/tinylogin /tmp/passwd

Now you can run "/tmp/passwd" to set the password for whatever account you're using. So run it once as "root", and then again when logged in as "guest".
-Dave Dodge

And an answer to the question..."Is there anyway to remount the various filesystems on the PhotoBridge to rw?"

Here's how to remount your Compact Flash card read-write:

Step 1 - Insert your CF card and run the Telnet application to connect to the PhotoBridge as explained above.

Step 2 - Next, enter the Linux 'cardplug' command. This is the best way to do an unmount of the CF card- it's what we do when you yank the card. Not only does it do a 'umount' but it also sends SIGHUPs to processes that have files open on the card, unmounts any mounted loopback filesystems from the card, and invokes dispatchmountmessage to notify CascadeApps of the unmount.

# cardplug unmount

Step 3 - Finally, remount the CF card for read-write access with...

# /bin/mount -n /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1 /mnt/flash1 -t vfat -o rw