Just wondering since I know a lot of people quietly use a screen-area-select -> tesseract OCR -> clipboard shortcut.
- I separate subjects of interest into different Firefox windows, in different workspaces – so I have an extension title them and a startup script parse text to ask the compositor to put them in the correct workspace (lets me restart more conveniently).
- I have automatically-set different-orientation wallpapers for using my 2-in-1 depending on whether I use it in portrait or landscape (kind of just for looks, but I don’t think if anyone else adds a wallpaper change to their screen rotation keybind).
It’s really quite simple - but works pretty well. There are 3 components:
Kiosk service
A simple systemd service that starts a kiosk script.
[Unit] Description=Kiosk Wants=graphical.target After=graphical.target [Service] Environment=DISPLAY=:0.0 Environment=XAUTHORITY=/home/pi/.Xauthority Type=simple ExecStart=/bin/bash /home/pi/kiosk.sh Restart=on-abort User=pi Group=pi [Install] WantedBy=graphical.target
Kiosk script
The script in /home/pi/kiosk.sh just starts a web browser in full-screen mode pointed at my home assistant instance:
#!/bin/bash xset s noblank xset s off xset -dpms export DISPLAY=:0.0 echo 0 > /sys/class/backlight/rpi_backlight/bl_power LANDING_PAGE="https://homeassistant.example.com/" unclutter -idle 0.5 -root & /usr/bin/chromium-browser --noerrdialogs --disable-infobars --kiosk $LANDING_PAGE
Display service
I have a very simple python/flask service that runs and exposes an endpoint that lets you turn on/off the display. It’s called by a homeassistant automation for when the motion detector senses or hasn’t sensed movement.
Here’s the python - I have this started from another “kiosk.service” systemd service as well.
#!/usr/bin/env python3 import subprocess from flask import Flask from flask_restful import Api, Resource def turn_off_display(): with(open(backlight_dev, 'w')) as dev: dev.write("1") def turn_on_display(): with(open(backlight_dev, 'w')) as dev: dev.write("0") class DisplayController(Resource): def get(self, state): if state == 'off': turn_off_display() elif state == 'on': turn_on_display() else: return {'message': f'Unknown state {state} - should be off/on'}, 500 return {"message": "Success"} def init(): turn_on_display() if __name__ == "__main__": init() app = Flask(__name__) api = Api(app) api.add_resource(DisplayController, '/display/<string:state>') app.run(debug=False, host='0.0.0.0', port=3000)
You can then have the HA rest action call this with “http://pidisplay:3000/display/on” or off.