Kitchen Computer
From Makers Local 256
Creator: |
Contents
Overview
A touch interactive kitchen computer for displaying recipes, watching cooking tutorials, and managing shopping lists.
Click This Link to See Larger Picture
Hardware
- Raspberry Pi 4 (Also needed: Micro HDMI to Regular HDMI, and a 2.5A USB-C Power Supply. A Yellow lightning bolt will appear on the screen if you selected an under powered supply.
- Raspberry Pi Case
- SD Card
- Touch Screen Monitor That works with Linux
- Articulating wall mounted monitor arm
- One came with our house, but you can buy them on On Amazon
- Microphone \ Speakers
- Keyboard and mouse for initial setup
Stretch Goal Hardware
- Wifi Camera pointing down over oven range
- A camera that can attach to the front of the oven and look inside. After market cameras that go inside an oven are prohibitively expensive.
Operating System Candidates
- LineageOS (Android): https://konstakang.com/devices/rpi4/LineageOS16.0/
- Note, do not follow instructions telling you to wipe after installing gapps. This will cause the lineageOS to startup in a mode that pops up the unregistered device notification that can't be closed, preventing you from getting to terminal and running the command to retrieve the GSFAID.
- Raspian
Software
- OS: Raspbian (A Linux Distro tailored for the RaspberryPi hardware)
Usability
Configuration
- Via terminal, created multiple users in case someone wanted to login to their recipe\gmail\etc accounts.
- Set Appearance Settings to "Very Large." We want it in this mode to make buttons easier to click with finger.
- Added an icon to bring up Matchbox-Keyboard to top bar. Currently you have to touch this icon each time you want to use the on screen keyboard, it does not come up automatically when you select a text field, like it does in Windows or Android.
- Improvement Idea: Rasbian might not have been made with touch interface in mind, but another distro like Linux might auto bring up the keyboard. This user experience improvement would be worth evaluating a different linux based OS.
Software
- Install Matchbox-Keyboard
- sudo apt-get install matchbox-keyboard
- On Rasbpian Desktop Toolbar, add keyboard application
- VNC Server (for remote maintenance without having to stand in the kitchen)
- Created Desktop Icon for a shell script that will quickly open the Appearance Settings configuration panel. Sometimes after reboot the display reverts to normal.
- Chromium web browser (comes installed with Rasbpian)
- Cooking Theme for Chromium (for aesthetics only, adds no capabilities)
- Recipe Saver (Free version lets you save up to 50 recipes, paid version is an unreasonable $9 a month. I would rather Save a webpage to PDF (which Rasbian can do) than pay $9 a month).
- Print to PDF Capability (Comes with Rasbian) for saving recipes locally.
Webpage Based Cooking Tools
- Allrecipes
- Gmail for emailing yourself links ( we have ours logged into a shared account so that visitors can't access our personal accounts ).
- Link to GoogleKeep (or any webpage) on desktop: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=171128
- Follow these steps to remove the annoying "are you sure" when you click it
- File manager
- Edit
- Preferences
- General
- Follow these steps to remove the annoying "are you sure" when you click it
Do not ask option on executable launch
- YouTube for cooking tutorials
Other Tools
- Balera-Etcher for flashing Rasbpian image to SD Card
- SD Card reader
Commercial Products
Products that offer similar experiences
- GE Kitchen Hub (available for kitcen hood and microwave). Expensive, over $800