The WPE project (TODO: place reference) allows you to create a hardware accelerated web viewing_ experience with an embedded system and inexpenive display.
For example a Raspberry Pi with an 7inch tftp touch screen has my brain racing with ideas for applications.
About WPE
WPE creates a cool hardware accelerated kiosk, just point at a URL and the app displays the application takes over the screen.
It is awesome! But, it has one major drawback.!.
Building WPE
But is also a pain to get going, no binary package at this point, and as far as I can tell, you need to start with buildroot, get all the configs correct, build and burn an SD image.
Phew. Not that I am not up for learning to use buildroot and getting a system going, but I could not find a straight forward recipe, very nicely written example suffered the nefarious outdated screen shots.
I did the best, first pass I could at cloning and configuring WPE for RPI3, but alas …
My first pass or two at configuring and compiling WPE failed, and had to move on to other things …, to be written about shortly.
Lacking an easy build requires me to spend time learning buildroot, WPE and a bit about the giagantic complexity that is webkit. Sounds interesting but I (like almost everybody in the universe) don’t have time for it.
Balena and Next Steps
Balena has created a working WPE image, unfortunantly when I add the WPE container to my Balena application, only 3 of the 4 required containers run.
Bummer!
Todo: look at how balena does it, maybe without so many containers.