{"id":6705,"date":"2020-03-25T12:20:00","date_gmt":"2020-03-25T12:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/notmart.org\/blog\/?p=6705"},"modified":"2020-03-26T08:55:42","modified_gmt":"2020-03-26T08:55:42","slug":"plasma-bigscreen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/notmart.org\/blog\/2020\/03\/plasma-bigscreen\/","title":{"rendered":"Plasma Bigscreen"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Today I want to introduce a project I have been working on together (mostly in the background) with some colleagues of mine\u2026 Now with beta status reached, it\u2019s time to more publicly talk about it: enter Plasma Bigscreen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Smart TVs are becoming more and more complete computers, but unfortunately there the experience tends to be a tight walled garden between proprietary platform, services and privacy-infringing features. Features which are very cool, like voice control, but in order to not pose a threat to the user privacy should be on a free software stack and depending less on proprietary cloud platforms where possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/plasma-bigscreen.org\">Plasma BigScreen<\/a> is a platform intended to use on smart TVs (trough a powerful enough small computing platform, such as the Raspberry Pi4, or any tiny computer if you need more power) with big remote-friendly UI controls, and Voice activation. What technology did we use for it? Plasma (of course!) and Mycroft.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" src=\"https:\/\/notmart.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/main-menu-1024x576.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-6708\" srcset=\"https:\/\/notmart.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/main-menu-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/notmart.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/main-menu-300x169.jpg 300w, https:\/\/notmart.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/main-menu-768x432.jpg 768w, https:\/\/notmart.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/main-menu.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><figcaption>Plasma Bigscreen main user interface<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Plasma Bigscreen is an user interface for TVs providing a 10 foot UI for a smart TV experience (on TVs or any screen with an HDMI connection). It is a Plasma Shell, just like our beloved Plasma Desktop and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.plasma-mobile.org\/\">Plasma Mobile<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It uses the familiar look and feel of Plasma but optimizes all the user interaction to be perfectly readable from the distance and controllable with ha simple basic remote control&#8230; from your couch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Besides interaction with a remote control, it also supports a modern way of iteracting that is revolutionizing the UX on all kind of devices: voice interaction. Optionally, it can integrate seamlessy with Mycroft: an opensource project aimed to offer a completely free voice assistant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Mycroft offers what are the so-called &#8220;skills&#8221;. Each skill, takes care of a particular voice interaction. there is an huge variety available, from the weather, do date\/time and reminders, to online services clients such as soundcloud and Youtube, with comprehensive QML bindings to show a rich User Interface in a Plasma Environment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We prepared a beta image for the Raspberry Pi4 for anyone to try, in which we pre-configured Plasma Bigscreen with Mycroft integration ready to go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube-nocookie.com\/embed\/iOxMuexAPaQ\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen=\"\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe>\n\n\n\n<p>If you have a Raspberry Pi4, you can try this image immediately: you can find it <a href=\"https:\/\/plasma-bigscreen.org\/#download-jumpto\">here<\/a>: just flash the file on a MicroSD and is ready to go on any Pi4.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Note that on that image, we point the device to the official Mycroft company&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/home.mycroft.ai\/\">&#8220;Mycroft Home<\/a>&#8221; service, which internally uses the Google STT (Speech to text) which does use google but in a more anonymized fashion as this is <strong>not<\/strong> tied to your Google account (nor requires having one). Tough not ideal, it&#8217;s possible to <a href=\"https:\/\/mycroft-ai.gitbook.io\/docs\/using-mycroft-ai\/customizations\/stt-engine\">configure<\/a> the Mycroft core to use different services, even those you can self-host like Mozilla Deepspeech.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In here to emphasize voice controls, we prepared some skills (some preinstalled, some can come from the kde store) to fully show voice controls. In particular a Youtube client skill which is perfectly usable both from a remote control and voice only.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" src=\"https:\/\/notmart.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/youtube-1024x576.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-6712\" srcset=\"https:\/\/notmart.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/youtube-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/notmart.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/youtube-300x169.jpg 300w, https:\/\/notmart.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/youtube-768x432.jpg 768w, https:\/\/notmart.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/03\/youtube.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><figcaption>Youtube skill shipped in the image<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>As remote control, you can use the remote of your TV directly if it supports the CEC standard, or any of those remotes with an usb dongle which are &#8220;seen&#8221; as a keyboard with just few standard keys (some have also an integrated microphone, so giving voice commands is very easy).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In the next days, there will be more posts explaining the architecture and the technical choices we made, in the mean time, have a try and if you want to get in contact with us about the project, you can find directions <a href=\"https:\/\/plasma-bigscreen.org\/#connect-jumpto\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today I want to introduce a project I have been working on together (mostly in the background) with some colleagues of mine\u2026 Now with beta status reached, it\u2019s time to more publicly talk about it: enter Plasma Bigscreen. Smart TVs are becoming more and more complete computers, but unfortunately there the experience tends to be [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[180,2,57,179,7,181],"class_list":["post-6705","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software","tag-bigscreen","tag-kde","tag-mediacenter","tag-mycroft","tag-plasma","tag-smart-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/notmart.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6705","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/notmart.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/notmart.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/notmart.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/notmart.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6705"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/notmart.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6705\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6722,"href":"https:\/\/notmart.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6705\/revisions\/6722"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/notmart.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6705"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/notmart.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6705"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/notmart.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6705"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}