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I want to use my PI for a ventilation system front end. I want it to boot up into my own simple GUI written in something like TKinter. We have occasional power cuts in the village so it must be able to re-boot and start up on its own.

I have played around with Debian but I can only make the program run within the Debian UI. If I include it in rc.local to start at boot without the GUI running it says it cannot find $display.

A simple PI GUI where I can automatically start my program once the GUI has loaded and I can occupy the whole screen (well most of it) would work.

Any suggestions please?

Brian

user3707423
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2 Answers2

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Any distro should be fine. You should probably avoid using an X server, if you just want a simple UI. You can use SDL to access the framebuffer, from a console program. If you are planning on using Python, PyGame is an option. A search for rasberry pi pygame brought up a number of tutorials for using it, including one from Adafruit.

Edit:

Some clarifications to my answer. The first paragraph sounds like you want an alternative to TKinter. If I were doing this project I would try to develop it without the overhead and complexity of the X server. In the last paragraph you mention wanting it to be fullscreen. Pygame using something like OcempGUI, shouldn't be much more complex than TKinter. You'd also benefit from having complete control, no accidentally moving the window offscreen, minimizing it on accident or something of that nature.

If you just want to start your existing TKinter Application, I think this question has the solution How to boot into own python script (GUI) only?

Community
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Philip Tinney
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Depending on what you are familiar with, Windows 10 IoT with a UWP app is perfect for this (on a Raspi2/3).

It does require a bit of a learning curve if you arent familiar with C# and XAML but the platform is easy to configure and deploy to, especially for a full screen 'Kiosk Style' application. They have full GPIO support straight out of the box, with loads of great samples.

I'm a big fan of Linux but not so much of Python - Win10IoT is a compiled application running on a secure platform and it's UWP big brother means that you can write code that is much more reusable and scalable.

Start here - https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/iot

You can get Visual Studio 2017 Community Edition for 'no money' with everything you need to build, test and deploy this project.

https://www.visualstudio.com/downloads/

Alan
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