Hi Orob. I am going to have my 11 yr old Anthony write directions below of how he made WebControl on Raspberry Pi 4 (8 gb ram vers) launch in chromium in kiosk mode with no keyboard required to go to the site once set. This allows you to mount a Pi4 to your maslow, mount a monitor on a Vesa mount hooked up through HDMI, and use it as a secondary monitor to view Webcontrol while you use your phone or laptop to control Maslow. They will all sync up together if done properly.
**You want to make sure you set Webcontrol to run as a service PRIOR to doing this using your directions above (and the from the wiki)
Step 1 - Set Webcontrol to run as a service (If you do not do this first, the Chromium page will not have anything to log into)
Before you move on to part 2, make sure you can log into Putty from you computer, or you will NOT be able to turn Kisok mode OFF (not easily if even possible). In order to turn Kiosk mode OFF someday, you need to be able to remote back into the Pi from Putty. Write down your IP address and these directions below, keep them somewhere safe so you can undo what we are about to do (or do all future coding through Putty):
- Open up terminal
- Type in this command “sudo nano /home/pi/.config/lxsession/LXDE-pi/autostart” (don’t put in the quotations) (For those that may not know, Sudo lets you go into files “above Pi” in the folder structure, and Nano means to open a file in text editor).
- Now it should show a file, please type in the following commands into the text editor (yes the @ sign is used here as we do not see that often in linux):
@xset s off
@xset -dpms
@xset s noblank
@chromium-browser --kiosk 192.168.1.1:5000 # this will load chromium after boot and open up the Webcontrol webpage
Please note for newbies, the comments I made after the # are just comments placed into that file so you know what it does if you were to open that file at another date. As far as coding goes, anything after a # is free form text to say what you want
Also, the IP-Address right after the “–kiosk” will change depending on the IP of your pi (don’t type this IP address in above, your IP address should be different. Type in your IP address of your pi, and don’t forget to add the port after it :5000). If you forget the :5000 after your IP, it will not work. You can always find your Pi’s IP address in your router app (look at connected devices if you forget the numbers)
5. Press Control-O and write/save to the file, then press Control-X to exit the text editor
6. Now close out of the terminal and reboot
This should now launch the pi into full screen WebControl. If you want to turn OFF the kiosk mode you must follow these instructions:
- Open up PuTTY and connect to your pi, login, and then proceed
- Now open a Terminal and type into the following:
“sudo nano /home/pi/.config/lxsession/LXDE-pi/autostart” (do not include the " " marks)
3 . Remove the commands typed in at step 3 and save using Control+O and exit using Control+X
- Now type “sudo reboot” and the pi should reboot back into the normal desktop (do not include the " " marks around sudo reboot)
- If later you want to turn back on, the file will still exist (don’t create another), and all you have to add back in is the line you removed.
**Alternate step 3 to turn OFF kiosk mode: You can also add a # in front of the commands in step 3, that may be easier for those that understand how # works. Make sure you write out file to save, and exit.
There you go Orob, hope this helps Also thanks for all your guys help in setting this up!! Virg and Anthony