Category: Electronics

Long cold winter

Electronics

During the long cold winter I spent some time coding.
I continued with my kitchen computer project.
First I chose to stick with Raspbian.
I chose to give up on Python and I am using Lazarus to program the kitchen computer.

I tried and tried to use Python but it was just too awkward to use for a GUI.
I switched to Lazarus and within a few hours I had the frame work for the interface. It is not finished and there is still some way to go.
I was able to load this portion on the Raspberry Pi and confirm that the buttons were accessible. The only issue I have right now is that the radio buttons are very small and quite close together.
Like all projects, I added more things. It is going to keep track of food for reordering when we are getting low, and I started to add a couple of timers. Now I think it might be too complex, so I need to go back and revisit it.

This is where things came to a stop.

My project got put on hold because I signed up for some EDX courses and that took a good chunk of 3 months. I actually took on too much all at the same time. I finished one course and the other is open until Dec 2014. I am just auditing them but it is fun to do.

Print cut and glue

Electronics

Here is a screen capture of the print out. It has 15 sheets of paper however I only printed the first 12 pages.
Next I glued the template to some foam board I purchased from the dollar store.
Once dried I scored lines to match the triangles on the side of objects labeled 1-2.

Then I cut out the four pieces. Object 1-1 is ignored and was part of another idea I had.

I cut out the opening for the screen and carefully glued the edges of the front, base and back to the s shaped parts.

The pieces look like this
Pepakura printout

All rounded LCD screen holder

Electronics

I have been busy with various things through the summer but one of the things I did was design the enclosure for my Raspberry Pi and the touch panel that went with it.
I used a 3D package to draw it. I exported it and imported it into pepakura.

Here is the concept drawing showing where the LCD sits. The shape was designed so that it would not be top heavy
and as stable as possible.

 

picture of the console
Artist concept

I got a Raspberry Pi, now I need a suitable distro for a touch screen

Electronics

I installed Raspbian before Christmas & I thought I should update the distro seeing that there was a newer version dated Feb 2013.

The touch screen finally came and I plugged it in and the display worked but the touch screen did not.
I was about to send an email to their tech support, when I thought I could try another distro.

I found a utility called Berry Boot that allows you to multi-boot several different Linux distros and makes it much easier to install several distros on the same SD card and try them.

So I started adding distros to a SD card: Raspbian, Puppy, RaspRazor and Sugar. There was also an update for Berry Boot, & a newer version of Raspbian. Wow now the touch screen works!
Now that I had a working touch screen, my criteria sort of changed and there was always something that prevented a given distro from being chosen.
The criteria I had were
1) icons on the desktop
2) one click to start a program
3) ablity to access my network smb drive
4) no login screen.
5) the ability to increase the toolbar or desktop fonticon size to “finger size”

My thoughts for my kitchen computer is sort of a kiosk computer where there is no physical mouse or keyboard.
I’m also looking at Arch, Raspbian, Puppy, RaspRazor, Pidora, PiBang, Bodhi, with various desktops like E17 XFCE and Openbox
Right now I have PiBang – XFCE riding over top of Openbox. It seems like the front runner