What do you use for kiosk software on a Win 10 touchscreen?

Posted on
Thu Dec 28, 2017 10:40 am
Different Computers offline
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What do you use for kiosk software on a Win 10 touchscreen?

Through odd circumstance, I have possession of an HP EliteX2 touchscreen Surface clone. I won't go into all the reasons it is a surprisingly terrible combination of hardware and software, but I will say that it has a pretty screen.

While its touchscreen is moderately awful as well compared to even an iPad1, it is functional more or less. So I'm trying to use it for a control page display and for the Airfoil Satellite app. I'm currently using FireFox in full screen mode. This is less than ideal because while I can put Airfoil in front of the control page, if I touch the control page and lose Airfoil behind the page, which requires fiddling to get back.

Any of you using a Win10 box for touchscreen display? If so, what do you do to "kiosk" it? I am not a Windows guy, so any answer that will work for me must not require registry edits. If your answer is "Chrome" it needs some very persuasive technical advantages.

SmartThings refugee, so happy to be on Indigo. Monterey on a base M1 Mini w/Harmony Hub, Hue, DomoPad, Dynamic URL, Device Extensions, HomeKitLink, Grafana, Plex, uniFAP, Fantastic Weather, Nanoleaf, LED Simple Effects, Bond Home, Camect.

Posted on
Sun Dec 31, 2017 10:43 am
vitaprimo offline
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Re: What do you use for kiosk software on a Win 10 touchscre

I bought a handful of thin clients to be used just like this. The model I got is the HP t5740, it runs Windows Embedded 2009 and has special HP software that lets you customize what launches at start up, one of this options is to open a browser, IE, full screen and logout or restart if the browser is somehow circumvented (read closed.) Being an old version of IE it'll have problems displaying Control Pages, but, you can set the thin client to do what's meant to do: RDP into a server fast and modern enough to manage what's displayed, like a vSphere-hosted virtual machine.

A used thin client is about USD20-40 on eBay, you really don't want to buy these devices new because they're very underpowered and very expensive, this is because of the management software they include, like the HP one I mentioned before; used though, with a little ventilation you can throw them into a cabinet and forget about them forever, they are most of the time passively cooled so they're silent.

You'll also need the drivers for the display and possibly an most likely a USB cable. I also have done this with Intel Compute Sticks and Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB, you'll need to sign up as a developer on the Microsoft website and you will need to learn how to deploy Windows Images but it's free, it's just very time consuming to learn the stuff. This version of Windows can work in Kiosk mode, either setting it up locally or through group policy in an Active Directory domain. For that you'll need Windows Server, you can get cheap licenses on eBay or download a trial from Microsoft, the image will still be needed if you get a license as it is the same. Once you start dealing with servers virtualization is a must, VMware is freeish--it quickly starts to get expensive and Windows includes Hyper-V for free but it's sort of a PITA specially if you come from the Mac world. If you're running a Pro-and-up version of Windows already, it'll be able to join a domain and through GPOs in Active Directory you can deeply customize it to get what you want--it takes patience though.

Good luck!
Last edited by vitaprimo on Sun Dec 31, 2017 10:57 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Posted on
Sun Dec 31, 2017 10:48 am
vitaprimo offline
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Re: What do you use for kiosk software on a Win 10 touchscre

...speaking of Chrome... I loathe it, but it made me remember one other thing, you can also get an Android terminal with HDMI output or install Android on a PC [http://www.jide.com/remixos-for-pc] and just download a Kiosk browser from the Google Play Store.

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Posted on
Sun Dec 31, 2017 12:42 pm
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Re: What do you use for kiosk software on a Win 10 touchscre

Thanks for all the ideas.

I guess I didn't make myself clear though. I'm not looking to purchase any hardware--I have hardware that I want software for, to enable a better touchscreen experience. What I have is an HP EliteX2 running windows 10.

SmartThings refugee, so happy to be on Indigo. Monterey on a base M1 Mini w/Harmony Hub, Hue, DomoPad, Dynamic URL, Device Extensions, HomeKitLink, Grafana, Plex, uniFAP, Fantastic Weather, Nanoleaf, LED Simple Effects, Bond Home, Camect.

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