Continuing with the Kiosk project

It is fairly interesting that just as with other "things" that I have equipped my house with, this Kiosk and other IoT gadgetry proved to be of relevance not just for my geek person, but for my family as well. For example my wife likes to keep track of the vacuum cleaner progress. Having its map and progress show up automatically when it starts cleaning, proved to be quite useful in this sense:

Attempting to repair a Vorwerk TM31 Bimby / Thermomix

At the beginning, when in my house we decided to purchase this kitchen food processor/blender almost 10 years ago, I considered it to be somewhat of an overpriced consumer asset in spite of the multiple features that it enclosed. Still I went with the hype and gave some credit to how much it could make life easier, in particular when it came to cooking meals and otherwise more complicated recipes.

Configuring Home Assistant to run off of a USB drive in a incompatible Raspberry Pi

 A problem with the earlier generations of Raspberry Pi's, especially the Pi 1 and the Pi 2 up to version 1.1, is that these cannot be configured to boot from an external USB storage device.

This is a particular relevant limitation for a number of reasons, including the fact that relying on an SD card for most of the storage needs is a solution that may have limited endurance.

The later versions of the Raspberry Pi (RPi 2 v1.2 and upwards), already offer some form of allowing external USB media to boot the operating system. 

Improving an RPI 2 based Home Assistant server for reliability and performance

For some time I have been using the same Raspberry Pi 2 v1.1 as the infrastructure for my Hass.io instance. It proved to perform quite reliably over the approximately 18 months I have been using it 24x7. From that time during approximately 1 year I used the same SanDisk Ultra XC I 64 GB MicroSD card:

Just for precaution I have later switched to a similar card, a SanDisk Ultra HC I 32 GB, and moved my Hass.io installation onto it:

Building a hardware watchdog timer for a kiosk or other system that needs to run 24x7 - version 2.0

My previous post covered a first version of a watchdog timer that I used in the past for another project. 

You may check it here.

As I mentioned there, I suspected that a somewhat different design would be necessary, because the target device could not have either GPIO pins available for allowing a keep-alive signal to be sent to the watchdog timer, or even if it had, it would be unlikely that the underlying linux OS on the Android system could not have the necessary drivers or support for changing the output of such pins.

Building a hardware watchdog timer for a kiosk or other system that needs to run 24x7

It was proven by Alan Turing back in 1936 that the halting problem applies for computing in general, and our contemporary computing machines are no exception.

Would predicting the crashing of an algorithm or program be a possible function, and we would be able to know the edge cases that cause an application to fail or enter a loop, without having to explore the actual scenarios to find these edge cases. To put it simply we would only have to ask the algorithm in which conditions it would enter a loop or end unexpectedly, and by not providing these inputs we would with absolute certainty not enter these scenarios.

Building a kiosk for Home Assistant from scrap parts - Part 2

With a project of this type, the hardware preparation is just the tip of the iceberg. It was thoroughly explained in the last post, despite one last change still being pending. What lacks is basically the addition of a resistive touch panel to the front of the screen, in order not to depend on the mouse as a pointer/input device. The panel is still somewhere between China and my location..

The first aspect that I found important to cover, now that I had this Android based kiosk up and running, was the ability to remote control it and launch arbitrary applications and services on startup.