After much experimentation, the problem with the pi 1b's converged on them being powered by a single USB expander & more importantly, plugged into the farthest ports.  They got more reliable when moving to the nearest ports on 2 separate expanders & pinging their ethernet to keep the network drivers alive.  Plugging in farther away in the expander made the pi's die more often.  Never thought of the traces inside the expander being a bottleneck.  The fact is the 1b's always needed beefier power connectors than USB or JST.  This setup was definitely living 1 day at a time.  The next step is going to be reducing the connections in the USB nest.

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An idea came to abandon LCD music displays & go back to paper as lions had done for many years.  Taping hundreds of sheets together was pretty awful.  Storing paper costs double what it did when the displays came along.  Lions use the display every day.  The only mane downside is lions don't read a lot of new pieces of music.

4k TV's now bottom out at 43" & $200. 4k monitors bottom out at 27" & $180.  27" would show  3 high quality pages, but probably be too heavy to sit on the keyboard.  It would need a stand & really be the next step towards the final arrangement. 

The desk would get a big piece of wood bolted on.  The monitor stand would clamp onto the wood.  It would stick 3.5" behind the keyboard & require moving everything into the kitchen.  It's not realistic to have any kitchen space left over.

For making video, the monitor would be the light or have lights bolted on top of it.  The hacked tripod light of the last 4 years would finally be scrapped, freeing up a lot of space.

What a monitor light could display.

The era of recycled laptop monitors on 3D printed stands is over.  Any upgrade would be a 4k monitor.

The 1st task is making the software draw 3 pages on a single 4k screen.  Since annotations proved useless, that's staying in the left screen only.  The user just needs to remember the cursor won't do anything in the right screen.  Then, the raspberry pi 4 has to be configured from the command line for portrait mode extended screens.

The easiest way is to keep the existing network client design.  Run the 2 programs on the same confuser & draw on the same screen.

The mane peculiarity is the program relies on FVWM to be configured to not draw a border.  That way it can use a minimal GUI library.

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