Poetry Display for Haringey Mind

Displaying seven different video feeds to seven different TVs, at the same time to display ONE spoken word performance. Using raspberry pi and arduino.

This project was a pro bono piece, an exhibition for Mind in Haringey, a mental health charity. The spec was to display a poetry reading, which included seven different video streams perfectly synchronized to showcase a spoken word performance.

In order to achieve this, we used seven raspberry pis to each output one of the video files, of which one was connected to an amplifier for the audio output.

The main challenge was to control them all at the same time, and since we were working to a budget, we decided not to go the easy way of using network equipment.

The solution was to use an arduino, with an infrared receiver that would read a button press from one of the original TV remotes, and output via serial TX a command to start the video on all of the RPis at once.