Raspberry Pi Raspbian Web Kiosk Virtual Keyboard Solution

Question

I followed Alan D. Moore's step-by-step guide to have my Raspberry Pi running in kiosk mode.

I did my own configuration as I needed it to run on a touchscreen with no physical keyboard and mouse.

Here's how my ~/.xinitrc file looks.

xset s off
xset -dpms
matchbox-window-manager &
matchbox-keyboard &
while true; do
    rsync -qr --delete --exclude='.Xauthority' /opt/kiosk/ $HOME/
    midori -i 600 -e Fullscreen -e Navigationbar -a http://myport.ac.uk
done

I used apt-get install for the matchbox-keyboard to be used as an on-screen virtual keyboard solution.

Just look at how small the keys are! Barely touchable and super inaccurate...

The real question is if anyone knows of a way to make the keyboard bigger, could recommend other solutions or tweak the config? I am a total debian newbie so I really hope I get some help here. :)

Answer 1

Try to reduce the resolution of your screen for X or for RPI overall to something smaller, ie 1024x768 or similar, based on connected monitor aspect ratio.

Typically in linux you can do it in X-server(xorg.conf) settings, but for RPI just edit /boot/config.txt to force a specific video mode, ie:

# Set monitor resolution to 1024x768 XGA 60Hz (HDMI_DMT_XGA_60)
hdmi_mode=16

All modes (including non-HDMI) are listed here for your reference: http://elinux.org/RPi_config.txt

Answer 2

You should be able to control where matchbox-keyboard shows using the --geometry argument. This page suggests that the appropriate call would be something like this:

matchbox-keyboard --geometry HxW.y.x

x and y are the on-screen coordinates of the top-left corner of the keyboard window (from the top left corner of the screen), and W and H are the width and height of the keyboard.

There's an application called devilspie2 that lets you mess around with where windows go when the application is first launched if they don't support the --geometry command line argument (that's most applications).

What you need to do is first install:

sudo apt-get install devilspie2

And then add it to the .xinitrc file so that it starts when X does:

matchbox-window-manager &
devilspie2 &
matchbox-keyboard &

Finally, you need to configure devilspie2 so that it knows what to do about matchbox-keyboard. You need to edit ~/.config/devilspie2/keyboard.lua:

if (get_window_name() == "matchbox-keyboard") then
    set_window_geometry(x,y,W,H)
end

x,y,W,H are the same as above. Assuming 1920x1080, I'd suggest something like 0,600,1920,480.

Answer 3

Since you are making a web app, how about javascript virtual keyboard, or sometimes called on screen keyboard, as discussed here

Answer 4

matchbox is a very primitive virtual keyboard. If you're open to other options I recommend checking out Onboard which makes theming & customization much easier. On raspbian you will also need the at-spi2-core module