Dragonframe Background Switcher

Switches the image on a screen in sync with Dragonframe events. The screen can be used as dynamic background during stop-motion recordings.

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Table of Contents

• Status
• Installation
• Usage
• Roadmap
• License

Status

This project is still under initial development.

Installation

Recommended installation method is using pipx. This will automatically install the application inside an isolated virtualenv and populate the provided executables via your PATH.

pipx install git+https://github.com/mv1005/dragonframe-bg-switcher.git

When installing manually with pip, using a virtualenv is recommened as well.

pip install git+https://github.com/mv1005/dragonframe-bg-switcher.git

Usage

Run the application

Run the program and specify an image directory:

dragonframe-bg-switcher /my/image/dir/

Connect with Dragonframe

Connect your Dragonframe instance to the server on port 8888 using the so called "Simple Interface". See Dragonframe documentation for details.

The program waits for events of type "Position Frame (Move to Frame)" received from Dragonframe, which according to the docs looks like:

PF [FRAME] [EXPOSURE] [EXPOSURE NAME] [STEREO INDEX][\r\n]

The third argument named EXPOSURE NAME will be used as image filename beeing looked up in the directory you specified when starting dragonframe-bg-switcher. That image will be loaded and served via a dynamic web page.

Note

Currently, the string in EXPOSURE NAME will be directly used as filename for the image "as is". Because Dragonframe does not allow dots in exposure names, your image files also must have no extension. This is unusual and cumbersome, but is a limitation of the current implementation. It will be improved in a next release. Also see Roadmap.

Display dynamic image in browser

To display that page, open a browser and connect to the webserver on port 5000 on the machine running dragonframe-bg-switcher.

The URL looks like http://<IP or HOST>:5000.

Once opened in your browser, subsequent PF-events will trigger an automatic update of the image shown on your screen without further action of the user.

To use this display as background for shooting stop motion frames, switch your browser to full screen mode.

Play around without Dragonframe

You can emulate the behaviour of Dragonframe with any program that is capable of sending text via a TCP socket.

The following shows an example using nc (netcat), assuming that dragonframe-bg-switcher is running on the same host.

nc localhost 8888

In netcat prompt, type any Dragaonframe event you like, e.g.

PF 1 1 test_image

This should trigger the loading of an image file named test_image (which must be present in the image directory) and show it in your browser.

Roadmap

Currently, the following features are planned for upcoming releases:

• Support image files with extensions
• Optionally, keep current image if event is received requesting a non existing image
• Fix short delay when image is show for the first time
• Support for indiviual backgound images per frame

License

Dragonframe Background Switcher is distributed under the terms of the MIT license.