Information Displays

Lets say you wanted to have a display in your office that is on all the time (24/7). It toggles between maybe grafana dashboards, your favourite webistes, or your own custom content.

The Setup

For hardware you will want a screen (any old TV will do), and a small computer (like a Raspberry Pi or a Dell Optiplex).

Software

Pre-requisites (based on Arch Linux):

chromium
xorg-server
xorg-xinit
openbox
xorg-xrandr
ddcutil
i2c-tools
konsole
nodejs
npm

Create /etc/systemd/system/getty@tty1.service.d/override.conf with the following content: (replace DISPLAY_USERNAME_HERE with the username of the user you want to autologin as)

[Service]
ExecStart=
ExecStart=-/sbin/agetty --autologin DISPLAY_USERNAME_HERE --noclear %I $TERM

chmod 0644 /etc/systemd/system/getty@tty1.service.d/override.conf

Then create /home/DISPLAY_USERNAME_HERE/.xinitrc with the following content:

#!/bin/sh
# Dynamically detect the connected output and rotate it
OUTPUT=$(xrandr --query | grep " connected" | cut -d ' ' -f1 | head -n 1)
xrandr --output "$OUTPUT" --rotate right --brightness 1
exec openbox-session &
sleep 2

# Disable screen blanking and power management
xset s off
xset s noblank
xset -dpms

bun run /home/DISPLAY_USERNAME_HERE/script.js &
chromium --kiosk --noerrdialogs --disable-infobars --disable-session-crashed-bubble --disable-features=TranslateUI "CHROMIUM_URL_HERE"

Ensure its owned by the user and has the correct permissions: 0755

Create /home/DISPLAY_USERNAME_HERE/.bash_profile (0644 owned by user) with the following content:

#!/bin/sh
if [[ -z $DISPLAY ]] && [[ $(tty) == /dev/tty1 ]]; then
    startx
fi

Mission Control

Lets say you have a display that you want to have on all the time. You might want to have some sort of daemon running on the display so that you can control it from elsewhere. To do this we can use v3x-mission-control.

Mission Control is a lightweight rust daemon that allows you to expose your displays backlight, brightness, and chromium controls to homeassistant via the mqtt integration.