Balena supported tablets

Hi!

We have an industrial setup with needs to kiosk-mode tablets. Currently we utilise stock Android tablets with kioskified setup with a specialized Android app, but this is quite hard to maintain and control the updates, compared to the beauty of Balena.

Knowing that there are GUI projects, such as Balena Dash, Balena Chromium Kiosk and Balena WPE we could ditch the Android app and instead put our web page in kiosk browser at the hands of the users.

But on the device support, I can only find one project: the RasPad. While the RasPad seems quite close to what we need, I would like to tap on the community to perhaps point me to alternatives that I haven’t discovered yet.

The use case:
Mostly desktop/wall fixed devices, showing monitoring dashboard with some additional workflows.
If the devices can be carried around, then additional use case would be to scan QR codes of items, then perform actions.
If the devices have a camera, then taking pictures of problems found and uploading them to our cloud.

Core requirements for fixed kiosks:

  • be supported by Balena OS (doesn’t have to be Raspberry-based)
  • have touch screen (10" would be great, anything below 7" would be too small)
  • Networking (WiFi required, LAN would be great)

Additional requirements for handheld devices:

  • have an internal battery so that it could be carried around
  • ideally have a camera to be able to scan QR codes (RasPad doesn’t)

I’m already thinking of hot-glueing some touch screen on top of Balena Fin :joy: – not the most elegant solution and couldn’t be carried around, but would work as Proof-of-Concept.

If anybody has any ideas, I’d sure like to hear them.

Best
Laas

Hi,

FYI Balena will support tablets soon as we are working on add support for the Surface Pro 6, you can follow the development process here https://github.com/balena-os/balena-intel/pull/246

This is great news! Surface Go would be quite exactly what we need, I think, both price and feature wise.

Can’t wait for the results already :smiley: