RCWeb NASA APOD
NASA APOD turns any RCWeb-capable display into a slow, cinematic slideshow of NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day. The viewer fetches the most recent month of APOD entries directly from api.nasa.gov, then cross-fades between them with a Ken Burns zoom/pan animation so each image feels like a deliberate shot rather than a static wallpaper.
What it shows
- Full-bleed image with cross-fade between slides
- Ken Burns animation (subtle zoom + pan, four rotating variants for variety)
- Image title, publication date and copyright
- Slide counter and a small QR code linking to the companion nasa-apod-c app
The viewer auto-advances every 16 seconds. Video APODs are skipped (or shown as their thumbnail) so the slideshow stays purely visual.
How it talks to the controller
This is a classic RCWeb asymmetric viewer. The viewer owns all state — the active slide index, whether the slideshow is playing, and the loaded entry list — and exposes a small public API on window.nasaApod:
nasaApod.next()
nasaApod.prev()
nasaApod.goto(index)
nasaApod.play()
nasaApod.pause()
nasaApod.toggle()
nasaApod.requestState(clientId)
Whenever the slide changes or play/pause toggles, the viewer pushes a snapshot to every nasa-apod-c client in the room with rc.sendFunctionCall("nasa-apod-c", "nasaApodControl.receiveState", snapshot). Newly joining controllers also call nasaApod.requestState(rc.client) to ask for a fresh snapshot addressed back to them.
Browser support
The viewer is written in ES5 with XMLHttpRequest, vendor-prefixed CSS animations, and no CSS Grid or custom properties, so it runs comfortably on older signage browsers as well as modern desktop and mobile browsers.
URL
/nasa-apod/?r=<room>