search

srobo / tasks

Collects all the tasks which we want to work on.
https://github.com/srobo/tasks/issues
1 stars 0 forks source link

Prepare Pis/Drivers For Display Screens #96

Closed mildlyincompetent closed 5 years ago

mildlyincompetent commented 5 years ago

This follows from #76 and specifically https://github.com/srobo/tasks/issues/76#issuecomment-478331948 has the details of what we want where.

kierdavis commented 5 years ago

See also #96.

RealOrangeOne commented 5 years ago

Do we have a canonical list of where we're going to have displays? It would be nice if we can get at least 1 per team pit location

Tyler-Ward commented 5 years ago

see also #99 for list of pis needed

PeterJCLaw commented 5 years ago

The Pis we have are in storage (#183), along with their SD cards. There's not a lot we can really do here without the SDs.

Tyler-Ward commented 5 years ago

I believe they are in southampton.

PeterJCLaw commented 5 years ago

Huh, the inventory agrees. This can progress then.

I suggest the steps (once we know what screens are needed) are:

  1. update srcomp-kiosk's config:
  2. build a fresh image around that (see https://github.com/PeterJCLaw/srcomp-kiosk/blob/master/INSTALL.md, though note that you almost certainly don't need to use the "lite" image it suggests)
  3. write that image onto each of the Pis
  4. (optionally) boot each Pi and run the update script mentioned in the install file
  5. label each Pi with its intended destination, for easy deployment

The boot-and-update step is optional as I always end up running the update script on all the Pis after deployment anyway.

Tyler-Ward commented 5 years ago

Does the script do anything other than set up a kiosk browser as there are pi images that are an off the shelf solution for this. e.g. https://github.com/guysoft/FullPageOS

PeterJCLaw commented 5 years ago

It does things like turning off the screensaver & power-saving stuff, plus setting up SSH access. It also knows intrinsically what URL to point at and sets a nice hostname for the Pi. The main unusual thing it does is configure the compbox as the NTP upstream for the box. If someone would like to explore off-the-shelf solutions that might be a useful iteration, though the NTP configuration is a hard requirement.

Note that because the current solution is known and well understood any replacement would be super-low priority. Additionally: the screens are not tested in Chromium, so their performance and behaviour would need testing if we switched (from Firefox). I would definitely like us to move towards a proper kiosk mode setup though - the current firefox-in-fillscreen-profile hack is nasty.

PeterJCLaw commented 5 years ago

Just had a very quick look at https://github.com/guysoft/FullPageOS. It's interesting, however:

PeterJCLaw commented 5 years ago

Blocked on the Pis making their way to me for configuration.

PeterJCLaw commented 5 years ago

Progress on this:

I haven't check that all the SDs are writeable. Given the experience with the compbox (#261), this is a possible failure mode, but I'm less worried because spare micro/SD cards are easy to get at short notice.

PeterJCLaw commented 5 years ago

Update: we managed to flash all the Pi SDs ths evening. They're now in a position to be deployed, but will need configuring after that.

Configuration is a case of sshing into each and running ./srcomp-kiosk/scripts/update.

PeterJCLaw commented 5 years ago

On the topic of alternative kiosk apps: http://openkiosk.mozdevgroup.com/

PeterJCLaw commented 5 years ago

These are done; any further updates are part of the standard setup/fixing phase, rather than prep.