Kiosk won't start

Configuration Frontend
1

Hello,

I am running HA on a RasPi3b+ since a few days.
Some users and devices are in operation.

Now I want to use a RasPi2b with attached touchscreen as kisosk for the living room.

I have found some excellent instructions:

I followed these instructions pretty closely.

Except for a few details (Chromium Browser is now just called Chromium, and some user paths had to be adjusted), everything worked great.

I use a different display and had to rotate it 180° in the config, which also worked.

When booting the system, a lot happens until there is only a black screen at the end.

There are no entries in Xorg.0.log.
The attached image shows the last screen before it goes dark …

HA-Kiosk
HA-Kiosk970×548 161 KB

Any Idea wht to do?

2

The black screen will be the default openbox desktop and it would appear the chromium hasn’t started. If you attach a mouse and keyboard to your pi/kiosk you should be able to right click on the desktop.

It’s been some time since I used openbox but I think the right click menu would give you an option to open a terminal. Do that and try the chromium command string you have in your autostart file. That should show if the command is correct for your system

Also, when I did it previously on a SCADA system controlling gates. the autostart file had to be placed in /home/{USER}/.config/openbox/

3

Oh great … seems, you know what your’re talking about.
I will attach a mouse and kbd to the pi and follow your advise.

Currently I am connected via ssh/putty to a terminal.

4

Hi again,
I have attached mouse and kbd but there is no cursor … no right click … nothing.
There is no openbox dir in .config either.

Any other hint?

5

Okay… I’ve done some more testing.

I added the command “lcd_rotate=2” to /boot/config.txt because the display was showing everything upside down.

During the boot process, I noticed that the orientation rotated 180° again midway through, and everything was upside down.

So I connected an external monitor to the HDMI port.

Lo and behold… right-clicking works, and I can also manually start the Chromium browser.

It doesn’t look great yet, and it doesn’t happen automatically, but I’ve made some progress.

So, the to-do list would be:

1 Redirect output to the connected touch panel (instead of the external HDMI port)
2 Get Chromium to autostart and configure it
3 Presumably, also rotate the display 180° in OpenBox.

6

Sorry, didn’t really go online for the last few days. Sounds like you’ve made good progress, well done :slight_smile:

My project was with an external HDMI. As I said when I did mine the autostart was in the directory path of your kiosk user that you have configured for auto login.