PimgStack Part 3 - A Tasker Based Phone UI

I have my stack based digital photo frame, PimgStack, nearly functional. The Raspberry Pi side of the equation is working well. I can send it image stack commands and have it react by showing the relevant photo on screen. All that was left to do was to create a simple Android app for sending images and stack commands to the Pi.

Tasker, Of Course

My go to strategy for building uber-lightweight mobile apps is to turn to Tasker. I tackled building this app in 3 steps.

Step 1. MQTT Communication

I created a Task that pushes messages to PimgStack by publishing an MQTT message. This may sound tricky, but was actually quite simple. There are a number of MQTT Tasker plugins already written, so I all had to do was pick one, fill in the message parameters and I was done.

I first built my Task around the MQTT Publish Plugin, but found that it wasn't reliable. It seemed to randomly fail to publish messages. I then switched to MQTT Client and now message sending is realiable.

Step 2. Core Tasks

I Implemented Tasks that correspond to each of the PimgStack operations: push, pop and clear. Pop and clear are trivial because they are static messages. Push is trickier, because it works in terms of a URL. But what if I have a local file and not a URL?

I solved this issue by falling back on another project of mine: 3shrink. I've setup 3shrink so that I can turn any file on my phone into a URL. You can see that I'm using this service to translate anything that doesn't look like a URL into one:

Step 3. Add Shortcuts

Finally, I needed a hassle free way to invoke the tasks above. For the Pop and Clear Tasks I used the Tasker Widget to add 1-click shortcuts to my home screen. They are now a press away from being executed. Push is trickier, as it requires an associated image or URL to an image to operate.

The heavy lifting to solve this problem is done by AutoShare. AutoShare connects a Task with the Android Share menu. From my photo gallery, for example, I can share a pic with the 'pimgstack:push' AutoShare command. When I do this, the file is delivered to the Push Task. This Task detects that it's working with a file, converts it to a URL via 3shrink and then delivers the URL to PimgStack via an MQTT message.

And It Works!

It all works! There are definitely improvements to be made. The process of delivering PimgStack commands takes a few seconds, not the instant behavior I'd hoped for. But the system is stable, I've put an unused Raspberry Pi and Monitor to use, and I can beam images from my phone to a screen. I'm calling this a win!