Recently, I was tasked with designing and setting up a simple, cost-effective, touchscreen-based self-service Kiosk which users can intuitively use to navigate a predefined website (and nothing else).
After spending some time researching the options (and realising just how expensive commercial touchscreens are!), I settled on the Dell P2418HT 24” touchscreen monitor and a Raspberry Pi. At a total cost of under $600 per Kiosk, it was a bargain when compared to the other options I’d come across ($1,200+ for the display alone)!
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find much online about running the Dell P2418HT with a Raspberry Pi and was advised by Dell that it was not supported. Determined to save money, I purchased the monitor anyway with the view of being able to upgrade to an Intel Atom-based NUC at a later date, if the monitor wasn’t compatible. It helped that I had a spare Raspberry Pi lying around, too!
To my surprise, both Alpine Linux (ARMHF) and Raspbian detect the touchscreen as a generic Touch-input HID device, so the touchscreen functionality worked out of the box!
As with anything, security should be of paramount importance, so I needed a way to lock users down to only the one particular website, and prevent them from being able to change browser/OS configuration.
A combination of Getty, an unprivileged user, and Chromium-browser’s kiosk mode seemed to fit these requirements perfectly, without impacting on the user’s ability to use the desired self-service website. I’ve documented the steps required to do this, below.
First, you’ll need to create a new, unprivileged user. e.g. kioskuser.
useradd -m kioskuser
You’ll then need to configure Getty to automatically login as this user, on tty1. The process for doing this will differ depending on whether you use Systemd or SysVinit.
With SysVinit:
Update the
/etc/inittabfile and change the tty’srespawnconfig, so that it looks like this:tty1::respawn::/bin/login -f kioskuserIf you’re using Alpine Linux, don’t forget to commit your changes to disk:
lbu_commit -d
With Systemd:
Create a file at
/etc/systemd/system/[email protected]/override.confwith the following content:[Service] ExecStart= ExecStart=-/sbin/agetty -a kioskuser %I $TERMReload the daemon and enable the
getty@tty1service, with:sudo systemctl daemon-reload sudo systemctl enable [email protected]
Next time you reboot your computer (or terminate your session, if using tty1), you should automatically be logged in as kioskuser.
Next, we need to configure Xorg to automatically run the browser when a new X session is initiated.
You can do this by logging in as the unprivileged kiosk user that we recently created (e.g. kioskuser), and creating a ~/.xinitrc file, with the following content.
#!/bin/sh
exec chromium-browser --kiosk http://myselfserviceurl.com/path
You may also need to update your ~/.bash_profile file so that it starts the X server on login (as long as a display is present):
#!/bin/bash
[[ -z $DISPLAY ]] && startx # Start X server if DISPLAY env var is set.
Once you’ve saved this file, reboot the raspberry Pi and you should hopefully be greeted with a full-screen Chrome browser with http://myselfserviceurl.com/path loaded!
If the browser crashes, or if you restart the Raspberry Pi, Chrome will automatically start up again and load the desired URL, running as a user with minimal privileges.
If Chrome doesn’t launch in full-screen mode, you may need to disable Overscan in your display preferences, or force Chromium to start with a specific resolution. To simplify the latter, you can update your ~/.xinitrc file to retrieve the current display resolution automatically, as follows:
#!/bin/sh
# Get the resolution
resolution=`xrandr --current | grep 'default connected' | cut -f3 -d ' '`
width=`echo $resolution | cut -f1 -d 'x'`
height=`echo $resolution | cut -f2 -d 'x' | cut -f1 -d '+'`
exec chromium-browser --kiosk http://myselfserviceurl.com/path --window-size=$width,$height