Add Touch-Screen to the Gateway

Is it possible to add a touch-screen directly to raspberry gateway?
If yes how?

You could plug in a touch screen like the official Raspberry Pi 7" touchscreen via the DSI port, or you could use a RasPad. But all you’d see by default is the command line interface, which you can’t interact with by touch. This is because our gateway build is based on the headless “lite” version of Raspbian.

You could try installing the full GUI version of Raspbian on your Pi and building the gateway from source yourself. Then you could view the web interface via localhost in Chromium (or install Firefox).

But beware, touchscreens are a bit clunky on Raspbian, which is really designed to be used with a keyboard and mouse E.g. You’ll see a mouse cursor following your finger around the screen.

I really don’t want to use gateway with touch screen…
I want to create an information kiosk with raspberry and at the same time run IoT gateway…

Hi Benfrancis, I have build the gateway from soruce and it work fine for my pourpuse.
I have another question:
How can I start gateway as a service or automatically?

I’m working on this right now. What @benfrancis said is correct you can build it from source. But, I’ve gotten it to work with balenaOS to where I have it running in multi-container docker next to electron react. Electron is serving up the localhost to the screen. The gateway builds from the mozillaiot/gateway:arm image. I’m still working through bugs, but it does work. There are a few things to consider, like making sure you have a timeout on the screen so you don’t burn it out. I have a Raspad, a 7 inch and a 13-inch screen from different manufacturers and they all behave differently with the touch. You will have to experiment with it a bit. I will report back when I have a stable version to play around with.

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@montique.willis and @negrival
How is this work going? And did either of you try creating a separate touch display that points to the gateway UI? An inexpensive tablet for example? The trick would be making sure the tablet screen stays pointed at the Gateway’s domain. (Can’t browse away from it.) But that issue needs tackling whether you run a touch screen from the gateway itself or use an independent box.

Extron makes good touchpads.

…I don’t work for them, just know that my company uses them in conference rooms.

I abandoned the idea, I use the gateway from smartphone

@kgiori Yup, I have a working proof of concept. Still improving it though. I am using a Raspberry pi 7-inch touchscreen and case. The gateway is running and it works well. I’m using docker to serve up a multi-container environment. One of my containers is Electron/React. I’m able to serve the local endpoint from there and it can’t be navigated away from. There are updates that I’m adding like on-screen keyboards and timeouts to prevent burning out the backlight. Once I have a stable version I will share it with the community for anyone to follow my steps. I’m about 90% of the way from a release version.

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Hey, how is your progress?

Hi @montique.willis
Glad that you are working on touch screen solutions, is there any updates from your side ? if yes, pls do update this thread…:slight_smile: