RASPBIAN JESSIE KIOSK

This documemt describes the process of turning Raspberry Pi running the original Raspbian Jessie into a kiosk machine, using Chromium browser, which has been recently enabled without the need of any workarounds since the Chromium browser was included in the latest version of Raspbian (2016-09-23).

• Setup
  • Initial pi configuration
  • Mouse cursor
  • Kiosk mode
• Additional tips
• Contribution

Tested on:

• Devices

  • Pi 3

• Raspbian

  • 2016-09-23-raspbian-jessie

Setup

Download the latest raspbian image and install the image on you SD card using the standard procedure.

Initial pi configuration

First, make sure everything is up to date

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install upgrade -y

Set your wireless network preferences using this guide.

Run the Raspberry Pi configuration tool

sudo raspi-config

In the configuration tool make sure to:

• Expand the file system
• Disable overscan from Advanced menu. This will help ensure the display fills the entire screen.
• Make sure the default option to boot is set to GUI autologin.

Restart.

Hiding mouse cursor

Display only

If you don't plan to use a touch screen, the solution is to use unclutter, which is a tool, that hides the cursor after some idle time.

sudo apt-get install unclutter

Touch screen

If you use touch screen to interact with you device, you probably don't want to see the mouse cursor appearing under your finger every time you touch the screen, so the answer here is to disable the mouse pointer alltogether. Just be sure your display is properly configured. (The 7" Raspberry Pi Display works pretty much out of the box)

In this case, instead of using unclutter, we simply edit the lightdm.conf file.

sudo nano /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf

Uncomment the xserver-command line under [SeatDefaults] (below the documentation) and add -nocursor parameter.

xserver-command=X -nocursor

Kiosk mode

To configure the pi to become a kiosk machine, all you need to do is edit the autostart file in ~/.config/lxsession/LXDE-pi/

sudo nano ~/.config/lxsession/LXDE-pi/autostart

Disable the screensaver by commenting out this line:

# @screensaver -no-splash

Add these xset options to disable some of the power saving settings:

@xset s off
@xset s noblank
@xset -dpms

If you've decided to use unclutter, you can configure it by using commands described here, for example adding this line will set the mouse pointer to disappear after 3 seconds of inactivity:

unclutter -idle 3

Add this line to start the Chromium browser in kiosk mode after boot:

@chromium-browser --noerrdialogs --kiosk --incognito https://google.com

The --noerrdialogs parameter will make sure that no error messages will pop up after restart if something causes Chromium to end unexpetedly.
Save, exit and restart your pi.

Additional tips

tba

Contribution

If you have useful tips, trick or scripts, feel free to add them to this repo.