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Inspired by things like these, I bought a 5" LED display for my RPI. The idea was to display the time / weather on Chromium in a "kiosk mode". I was however sur

by rockyj 6y ago

Inspired by things like these, I bought a 5" LED display for my RPI. The idea was to display the time / weather on Chromium in a "kiosk mode". I was however surprised that with the latest install of Raspbian OS it was even hard to open a simple webpage on Chromium. It was just too slow. I would really avoid buying / building anything on a RPI from now.

Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
That's Chromium on ARM under pure Linux, not necessarily an isolated RPi issue. I've found both Chromium and Firefox to be unusable on even Jetson with Nvidia graphics but a similar specced fan-less x86-64 Chromebook handles browsing with ease as Google has done a fantastic job in optimising ChromeOS. So browsing experience on ARM SBCs have left more to be desired largely due to lack of memory. Can anyone share their browsing experience on 8GB RPi?
- nbernard 6y ago
  I'm using Firefox on a 4GB RPi4 daily, without problem (with uMatrix that disables unneeded scripts however). It is a bit slow on media-heavy sites (youtube, ...). It tried the same software configuration previously on a RPi 3B+ (1GB): there, Firefox was quickly exhausting the RAM.
tomcam 6y ago
Wait why not just write a clock program yourself? Was the point that you would also use Chromium once out of kiosk mode?
- rockyj 6y ago
  Yeah, the idea was to just display a nice SVG + CSS + HTML clock with Chromium running in full-screen mode (screensaver off etc.). I know it is not the most efficient option but I was surprised that RPi struggled with opening a HTML page on localhost.
  - tomcam 6y ago
    I mean using QT or wxWidgets or something lower level that will not require a browser
  - elcritch 6y ago
    I'm running RPi3's in Kiosk mode with a somewhat complicated UI (realtime graphs and such). It's a bit slower on some actions, but plenty usable. If you want to try it again sometime and are up for trying Elixir, look into the Nerves based kiosk. It builds an image specifically for the RPi3, and you can run Phoenix LiveView and entire system for less than a hundred megs of ram: https://github.com/nerves-web-kiosk/webengine_kiosk https://github.com/nerves-web-kiosk/webengine_kiosk
jmnicolas 6y ago
Fwiw, 2 years ago I tried to develop an app at work on Windows IOT on a Raspberry Pi 3. I abandoned pretty quickly, the thing was having a hard time just scrolling some text. At the time I thought Windows IOT was not optimized, but maybe it's just the whole x86 ecosystem that hasn't been adapted to ARM computing. I think you can install Android on a Pi, it would be interesting to see if Chrome is fast enough there.

by rockyj 6y ago

Abishek_Muthian 6y ago

That's Chromium on ARM under pure Linux, not necessarily an isolated RPi issue. I've found both Chromium and Firefox to be unusable on even Jetson with Nvidia graphics but a similar specced fan-less x86-64 Chromebook handles browsing with ease as Google has done a fantastic job in optimising ChromeOS. So browsing experience on ARM SBCs have left more to be desired largely due to lack of memory. Can anyone share their browsing experience on 8GB RPi?

nbernard 6y ago
I'm using Firefox on a 4GB RPi4 daily, without problem (with uMatrix that disables unneeded scripts however). It is a bit slow on media-heavy sites (youtube, ...). It tried the same software configuration previously on a RPi 3B+ (1GB): there, Firefox was quickly exhausting the RAM.

tomcam 6y ago

Wait why not just write a clock program yourself? Was the point that you would also use Chromium once out of kiosk mode?

rockyj 6y ago
Yeah, the idea was to just display a nice SVG + CSS + HTML clock with Chromium running in full-screen mode (screensaver off etc.). I know it is not the most efficient option but I was surprised that RPi struggled with opening a HTML page on localhost.
- tomcam 6y ago
  I mean using QT or wxWidgets or something lower level that will not require a browser
- elcritch 6y ago
  I'm running RPi3's in Kiosk mode with a somewhat complicated UI (realtime graphs and such). It's a bit slower on some actions, but plenty usable. If you want to try it again sometime and are up for trying Elixir, look into the Nerves based kiosk. It builds an image specifically for the RPi3, and you can run Phoenix LiveView and entire system for less than a hundred megs of ram: https://github.com/nerves-web-kiosk/webengine_kiosk https://github.com/nerves-web-kiosk/webengine_kiosk

jmnicolas 6y ago

Fwiw, 2 years ago I tried to develop an app at work on Windows IOT on a Raspberry Pi 3. I abandoned pretty quickly, the thing was having a hard time just scrolling some text. At the time I thought Windows IOT was not optimized, but maybe it's just the whole x86 ecosystem that hasn't been adapted to ARM computing. I think you can install Android on a Pi, it would be interesting to see if Chrome is fast enough there.