Developer Soumya Deb has developed a device that makes it simple to show any Raspberry Pi right into a kiosk gadget, providing a “webpage shuffler” and straightforward administration over the community with a one-shot setup course of.
“This began as a easy automation script — a wrapper of the official Raspberry Pi kiosk mode tutorial for private use,” Deb explains of the PiOSK challenge. “Then one factor result in the opposite and I discovered myself putting in Node.js & writing systemd
unit recordsdata… That is after I realized… possibly there are different individuals (or future me) who’d additionally discover it helpful.”
The Raspberry Pi household of single-board computer systems are standard units for organising kiosk units, due to their affordability and low energy draw. Fairly than providing an ordinary desktop setting, a kiosk-configured Raspberry Pi hundreds a full-screen internet browser to the web page of your selection — and goals to make it troublesome for customers to flee to the underlying system under.
Usually, organising a Raspberry Pi as a kiosk gadget is a guide course of — however PiOSK handles all the pieces routinely. Whereas this command is, admittedly, the never-a-great-idea curl-to-bash pipeline — downloading the set up script sight-unseen and instantly piping it into the bash shell with root privileges — it may possibly’t be faulted for pace, even when safety takes a again seat.
PiOSK comes full with distant management of the “screens” to show. (📷: Soumya Deb)
As soon as put in, PiOSK runs a browser full-screen and routinely rotates between a collection of pre-defined web sites. An internet interface permits these to be custom-made, with out having to go hands-on with the Raspberry Pi itself. The script does, nevertheless, have a number of necessities — together with that you just’re utilizing the 32-bit model of the Raspberry Pi OS Linux distribution and that it is utilizing Wayland with the Wayfire compositor.
PiOSK is obtainable on GitHub underneath the permissive Mozilla Public License Model 2; “that is removed from completed,” Deb admits, “it is simply the primary checkpoint that meets my preliminary purpose of constructing your entire course of a ‘single script setup.'”