Kitchen Computer

Creator: Omegix Status: Your Status Born On: 08:43, 16 January 2020 (CST) Last Updated: 09:47, 21 January 2020 (CDT)

Overview

Goal is to create a kitchen computer for displaying recipes.

Alternative Approaches

This is where you would see a picture of the project if our wiki server was configured properly. But we're a non-profit so you know, budget constraints.

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
  • 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 Aesthetics, adds no additional 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 ).
• 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