chilipie-kiosk

Raspberry Pi image for booting directly into full-screen Chrome. Perfect for dashboards and build monitors. Main features:

• Boots directly to full-screen Chrome - with all the features of a modern browser
• No automatic updates - no surprises due to Chrome (or other packages) suddenly updating
• Automatic crash-recovery - accidentally unplugging your kiosk won't result in "Chrome did not shut down correctly :("
• Custom startup graphics - displays customizable graphics while the browser is starting up
• Lightweight window manager - uses Matchbox for minimal clutter and memory footprint
• HDMI output control - ready-made scripts for e.g. turning off the display outside of office hours
• Cursor hiding - if you leave a mouse plugged in, the cursor is hidden after a brief period of inactivity
• Based on a recent Ubuntu - if you want to add your own hacks, all the expected packages are one apt-get away
• Batteries included - the most common how-to's have been collected to the first-boot document

Hardware

IMPORTANT: The latest Pi 3 Model B+ isn't yet supported. This should be fixed soon.

Not all hardware works perfectly with the Pi, so to save you some digging, here's a (non-exhaustive!) list of configurations known to work:

• Recommended kits (let us know of others!)
  • Raspberry Pi 3 Starter Kit (amazon.de, verkkokauppa.com)
• Components bought separately (let us know of others!)
  • Raspberry Pi 2 or 3 (verkkokauppa.com)
  • Compatible 8+ GB microSD card (verkkokauppa.com)
  • Micro-USB power source (most people will have these laying around)
  • Display cable, either
    • Regular HDMI for televisions, or
    • HDMI-to-DVI for computer displays
  • Optional extras
    • Case for the Pi (verkkokauppa.com) - if you're worried about looks and/or gathering dust
    • USB WiFi-dongle (verkkokauppa.com) - if you can't get ethernet, which will usually be more reliable

Software

Preparing the image is easy. Assuming you're on macOS:

1. Download and decompress the latest image
2. Insert your microSD card
3. $ diskutil list to carefully check the correct device (/dev/disk2 is used as example below)
4. $ diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk2 to prepare it for imaging
5. $ sudo dd bs=1m if=chilipie-kiosk-v1.2.1.img of=/dev/rdisk2 to flash the card (rdisk is faster raw access)
6. Grab a coffee, this will take a while. On OSX, pressing Ctrl + t, will give you the amount of bytes transferred.
7. $ diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk2 to safely eject the card
8. Insert the microSD card to your Pi and power it up!

The first boot should land you here.

Common issues

• I get a kernel panic on boot, or the image keeps crashing. The Raspberry Pi is somewhat picky about about its SD cards. It's also possible the SD card has a bad sector in a critical place, and dd won't be able to tell you. Double-check that you're using a blessed SD card, and try flashing the image again.
• I see a "rainbow square" in the top right corner of the screen, and the device seems unstable. This usually means the Pi isn't getting enough voltage from your power supply. This is sometimes the case in more exotic setups (e.g. using the USB port of your display to power the Pi) or with cheap power supplies. Try another one.
• The display control scripts don't turn off the display device. Normal PC displays will usually power down when you cut off the signal, but this is not the case for many TV's. Please check if your TV has an option in its settings for enabling this, as some do. If not, you can try your luck with HDMI CEC signals, but the TV implementations of the spec are notoriously spotty.