WebGL streaming in a Raspberry PI Zero W

A week ago I received my Raspberry Pi Zero W to play a bit with some IoT device. The specs of this small device computer are the following:

  • 1GHz, single-core CPU
  • 512MB RAM
  • Mini HDMI and USB On-The-Go ports
  • Micro USB power
  • HAT-compatible 40-pin header
  • Composite video and reset headers
  • CSI camera connector

But the interesting part comes with the connectivity:

  • 802.11 b/g/n wireless LAN
  • Bluetooth 4.1
  • Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)

And especially from one of the hidden features that allows one to use the device as a headless device and connect using SSH over USB adding the following line to config.txt:
dtoverlay=dwc2
And modifying the file cmdline.txt to add:
modules-load=dwc2,g_ether

remember to create a file called ssh to enable SSH access to your Raspberry Pi. There are plenty tutorials over the Internet showing this! :D

To build a Qt version for the device you can follow this guide.
In the following screen shot, we can see the calqlatr example running directly on the Raspberry Pi:

clocks_pi_zero

One of the use cases which comes to my mind using this device and this feature is being able to create portable presentations and show them on any computer without the need of installing new software.

presentation_pi_zero

For the presentation, I used the qml-presentation-system (link).

More use cases could be:

  • Application showcase.
  • Custom text editor for taking your notes everywhere.
  • ...

Please comment if you have other ideas or use cases.


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