Touch screen info kiosk

[Boerseun]

Howdy

 

I was asked by a customer to design and program a touch screen information kiosk for their shop.

 

Here's my question:

 

If you take a transparent touch membrane and stick it over an LCD panel, how do you adress the touch inputs in the programming language?

 

Say, for instance, in Delphi, I would say OnClick or OnRightClick when assigning mouse actions, now the touch membrane takes over the mouse pointer. Would you still adress it the same, programatically? Or would it now be OnTouch or OnTap or something similar?

 

Any ideas, or have any of you most respected geniuses [/brownnosing] any experience in programming using touch membranes?

[alexander]

what about just buying an LCD touchscreen? if you want i have a long script that transforms a fresh ubuntu install into a kioskified fortress, from there, you can make a website and make your kiosk to only be able to access it... Its uberhacked firefox, with some minor mods in the way ubuntu starts, then all you have to do is define websites that should be accessible in one file, and just make sure that the touchscreen you order will be supported in Linux (and i think the overwhelming majority already is), and thats it...

[Buffy]

Touch screens all come with drivers that provide mouse emulation, so yes, programmatically all you gotta do is do the same stuff that goes for mouse events. They're all exactly the same, unless your code is doing something really wacky like depending on getting a stream of mouse locations that are "continuous" (something that you should never do even if you've got a mouse).

 

Scurrying around the pad,

Buffy

[Buffy]

...if you want i have a long script that transforms a fresh ubuntu install into a kioskified fortress, from there, you can make a website and make your kiosk to only be able to access it...

Uh, its called "locking the keyboard in the cabinet". Does not require Linux or Ubuntu. Honest! :confused:

 

Its just that your Karma will be better of you don't use Windoze, right alex?

 

Using what works,

Buffy

[alexander]

yeah, so touchscreens are supported, now wanna give that script a try? i gotta get it... oh and it beats any kioskify script available for firefox and ubuntu...

[alexander]

no, this way, you can still leave the PC out, the keyboard out, oh and you can get a keyboard java app online and use it to type up eveything... as well as there is one in

Windows

/forums/images/smilies/devilsign.gif

that comes with a default install... oh and there are usb ports on the fronts of the pcs, that will allow you to just connect the keyboard and use it that way... trust me kioskify script is a better solution then lockup...

[Boerseun]

Thanks, guys - feel much better about my predicament!

[CraigD]

Back in the 20th century, I wrote a simple bit of file retrieving and importing code for a small (about 40) survey-taking kiosk Win16 PCs on a private network. The kiosks software was proprietary stuff by a fairly big vendor specializing in kiosks who also sold the kiosk cabinets and the PCs and touchscreen monitors that went in them.

 

Shortly after deployment, we began noticing a few facilities' kiosks produced very little data. The same facilities also had daily service calls, where the field tech invariably found the kiosk showing a normal Windows desktop, usually with Solitaire or Minesweeper open (big vendor hadn’t bothered removing games, or doing much of anything else to the OEM-installed WinOS). After big vendor failed to provide an explanation or fix (other than suggesting that a staff person be assigned to guard the kiosks!), I got pulled into the hunt.

 

Early on I noticed that touchscreens with hardware and drivers can be clicked really fast – 10 fingers, jazz piano style, way exceeds the quickest mousebutton finger. So early on, I tried just jittering both hands spastically over one of the kiosks running its survey program, and was rewarded within 10 seconds or so with a VB Runtime module error popup, and the windows desktop. Turns out Win16 WB’s mouse event buffer wasn’t sized with such abuse in mind, and practically any VB app with button controls could be crashed using the crazy finger method.

 

I’ll spare everyone the rest of the story – a typical tale in which heroic in-house IT vanquishes evil 3rd party vendor, saving the day and data. But, since then, I’ve made a habit of trying the crazy finger method on any kiosk machines I encounter. My last was a couple of months ago in a small, upscale organic super market, and I was rewarded with a protected memory fault popup and the default WinXPpro desktop. Amazing how little some things change!

 

The moral of the story is, test a machine intended to be left untended in a public place as if it were to be left in a monkey cage, because, effectively, it is. :shrug:

[alexander]

yeah, see craig, this could not happen in a propperly kioskified linux box, for the fact that you would run as a user with no privilages, and even if something like that happens (and in our kioskify script, we sat one of our guys down to play the organ, i mean the keyboard for over 20 minutes non stop, and click on everything, then our other hacker members sat at the thing including myself and carefully tried to get out of the environment, carefully editing the Firefox about.config in an attempt to make the damn thing allow you to even view any other website then the one that was permitted. Found only one flaw, it lasts for about a second on boot, and if you at just the right time cancel the loading of the Xorg, you gain access to a regular console login screen, and granted that the kiosks get booted by our it guys anyways, and once it boots the only way to reboot the box is to ssh into it as root, or pull the plug, and the hardware is secured by our IT... No successful breakins or problems of any kind have been reported from when we rolled out the kiosks for class registration at our college last August, and we have already submitted a couple of patches that made stuff like PDF files open in a pdf viewer and still be very secure) you would still be left with a shell of a user who can't even ls his own directory...

 

P.S. you have no idea how many hours it took to make firefox completely uncapable of opening new tabs...