We are going to build a simple control station that begins with a Raspberry Pi and connected 7 inch touchscreen tablet. I have it setup in “kiosk mode”, which is basically full page chrome without the tabs and tool bars etc.
The touchscreen installation was nearly trivial, though I am using two power supplies, it would complain with just one.
I decided that it would really cool to use a Raspberry Pi as the control station for MBR, even cooler, why not attach a 7in touch screen to the RPI for configuring and monitoring the robot / system.
Power
The standard power taken from Mains should be fed with a 2Amp power supply connected to the Display Adapter Card.
You can optionally attach and additional 2am power supply to the RaspiBerry Pi thus driving power to the display and adapter card, in addition to the power supplied to the display, thus powering the Pi and Display seperately.
Graphics
Graphics for control software can be done in a number of different ways. Unless compelled by good reason otherwise, we’ll stick to webapps: HTML, CSS and JavaScript through a web server.
This will allow us the most bang for our buck.
TODO: add a pic of the control station.
Chromium Kiosk Mode
Our user interface will be local server software that will provider our controller with everyting it needs to do to control our mobile robots and assocociated components.
TODO ~ locate the chromium kiosk mode and how to start in that mode.
Monitor Mode
Monitor mode will provide us with a health status of our environment, Configuration mode allows us to modify configurations and control mode allows us to control our vehicles.
We are going to write a Webapp served up by the local machine, which will be run in Kiosk mode. We’ll need to determine all the screens that will run in Kiosk mode, but we will have our local server, serving up some cool stuff!
Additional SPI(?) Pins
The adapter board attached to the screen has a couple additional pins that allow stuff.
TODO: check out the pins on this display