Hi, I have access to a decent amount of ewaste through my time volunteering at my local free stuff Swap Shop and I’ve been thinking about turning some old computers and monitors into displays for my local bus routes. The city transit system already has a website that shows the position of all the buses on each route, I just need to some sort of kiosk OS that’ll display it reliably and pull it back up after getting rebooted.
The idea is to make sure they’re reliable and offer them on my local free groups to anyone with a window, apartment or storefront, near a bus stop. So they’d be indoors, sheltered, and connected through whatever Wi-Fi is available at each location.
We get all kinds of stuff, from chromebooks to those PC/monitor combos, old laptops, and tons of screens. So whatever your recommendation is, chances are I’ll get access to something suitable eventually.
What I’m looking for is recommendations for the software, probably a kiosk OS, that can be set up to just display a website (possibly two instances of it tiled side by side of the stop serves more than one route). It’ll probably need to refresh it occasionally and it’ll definitely need to snap back into the same display mode after losing power. The goal is something reliable, as close to set-and-forget as I can probably get kludging this together from ewaste and FOSS.
So far folks have recommended Wayland Compositors like Cage Kiosk and ChromeOS kiosk mode. If you have any strong feelings on alternatives or other ways if doing things, please let me know! Thanks!
I don’t know about specific OS, but desktop-less Debian (or Alpine/postmarketOS for mobile) would be able to automatically log in and run fullscreen Chrome. Network/WiFi config would need to be done only once.
I built a kiosk-like weather display a while ago. Same idea applies, just with Chrome instead of Midori.
Thanks! That seems pretty straightforward!
I don’t have any recs, but as a frequent bus rider I love this idea and hope that lots of businesses take you up on it!
Thanks, this is the second rec for cage so I’ll try it out on a spare laptop and see how it goes
Most ewaste isn’t built for surviving over 3 to 5 years in operation.
Where is this statistic from? Surely depends on how it’s used. I made a Raspberry-Pi powered kiosk to monitor cameras (very similar to OP’s project in concept) for a friend 7+ years ago, it’s still running.
Things are built to warranty. That take engineering. Most things are designed to fail, unfortunately.
Most warranties are 3-5 years. The government and businesses also depreciate technology (computers) on a 5 year basis.
Most technology follows a bathtub failure curve. Technology that outlasts 3-5 years is frequently a fluke and they try hard to minimize those.
I’ll take that warning as a vote of confidence in my ability to configure systems for reliability! Honestly if we get to the point that systems are failing for hardware lifespan reasons we’ll have exceeded my expectations and I’ll issue some new ewaste. Fortunately the return policy at the free stuff swap shop is very generous.
