I often want to make food or cocktails in the kitchen, and I either just put my phone on the counter and get it dirty/sticky or print out a recipe
Neither of these are very handy. So I decided to build a PC with a touchscreen that I could place in the kitchen and view recipes on
Luckily, I have a self hosted instance of Mealie I keep my recipes in, and it has quite a good UI. I have a few spare Pi’s which I wanted to use, but I found touchscreens for them are expensive and generally low quality
But, I realized I have an old ThinkPad X1 Carbon collecting dust. Its old, and the screen hinge is not in the best of shape. So my plan is to get this setup as a sort of Kiosk PC in the kitchen in a custom frame/enclosure. Its an i7 3667U with 8GB of RAM and a 256GB M.2 SSD
Here are details and where I am, and what I still need to do
Here is a Demo of where we are at right now
- Installed Pop_OS (Why? It seemed to work well with laptops)
- Enabled SSH so I can remotely manage it
- Set the account to Autologin
- Set Firefox to start on login and go to the Mealie instance
- Installed ForceFull on Firefox so it goes full screen automatically
- Set it with the lowest power more, and not to go to sleep
And the long list of things to do
- Confirm idle power usage. Right now it seems to be a little high. It may be spiking up to try charge the old battery?
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Possibly remove the battery. But, if I do I need to make sure its UPS backed. So possible PoE powered? Getting 20v out might be tough though
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Figure out passive cooling. In a custom enclosure I should be able to passively cool it
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Figured out how to disable pinch to zoom in Firefox. It can really mess it up, and getting it back to 100% is tough
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Make VNC available on boot. VNC seems a little weird in Pop_OS
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Possibly make the OS read only?
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Find a way to go back and forward easily. Swiping left and right does not work
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Fix this issue where swiping down to get the address bar exits full screen (Also happens with Kiosk mode)
- Fix an issue where the cursor lands on the edge of a recipe and ends up causing a flickering address in the bottom left
Would love any comments and input