O2 Joggler Home-Assistant Kiosk

Overview

I wanted to setup a ‘kiosk’ style interface for our home automation setup, powered by Home-Assistant. I managed to pickup an old O2 Joggler for ~£20 on eBay a while back. It’s perfect - Small, touch-screen Linux box with USB, Ethernet, WiFi and audio.

Thanks to the wonderful work of Andrew Davison of BirdsLikeWires.net, there is already a great Debian based image that can easily be flashed to the Joggler.

I originally wrote a post about my process for setting up my Joggler using his Ubuntu, but as described on his website, Andrew made the switch of the base OS to Debian due to incomplete 32-bit support beyond Bionic.

So I am updating my documentation of the process I used here: mainly for myself, but if you find it useful - great!

Please consider donating to Andrew on BirdsLikeWires.net as a thank you for the awesome work that makes this possible!

Setup

Download the Debian image

Download the image from BirdsLikeWires.net (I used the ‘Kernel 5.4’ version).

Flash to USB

Flash the image to a USB stick. I used Balena Etcher.

Make sure you use a USB stick large enough for the applications you want to install. I used a 16GB drive.

Boot

Once complete, plug the USB stick into your Joggler and power it on.

There is a USB port on the side of the Joggler that you can use. There is also an internal USB port that you can access by removing the small clips round the edge of the screen. By default this is occupied by an internal WiFi card. I removed the internal USB WiFi card from my Joggler as it was going to be connected via Ethernet, so I could use this port to boot instead for a cleaner look. But you could just use a really slim USB stick too!

You may want to consider using a powered USB hub connected to the Joggler, so that you can plug in a keyboard and mouse for the initial setup in case you don’t want to use SSH.

Setup

Take a look at the details on: birdslikewires.net for how to connect and the default username/password.

Expand the root partition: sudo of-expand

Update packages and upgrade installed packages: sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

Install xserver (this will take quite a while!): sudo of-install xserver

You’ll be asked for a language and a keyboard

Install LXDE (again, this will take a while!): sudo apt install lxde-core -y

A note on Chrome Chrome (chromium-browser) isnt available in the repo for this version of Debian. chromium is, but I had some issues getting it to start on my Joggler. So for this guide I’ll be going with Firefox!

Install Firefox: sudo apt install firefox-esr -y

Install Unclutter to hide the mouse: sudo apt install unclutter -y

Installed matchbox-keyboard sudo apt install matchbox-keyboard -y

Auto-start LXDE and auto login as ‘of’:sudo of-settings autostartx of

Reboot to check that LXDE starts up on boot:sudo reboot

“No session for pid 463” error. ???? Not sure why this happened?

Open Firefox and login to your Home-Assistant instance, select the dashboard etc. (I’d recommend using a mouse to do this, otherwise press CRTL+ESC and then navigate to Internet > Firefox ESR)

Start xserver and load Firefox as ‘of’ user: sudo of-settings autoxrun of firefox

Edit the ‘.xinitrc’ file to add the command line switches for Firefox kiosk mode: nano .xinitrc

Change the bottom line to:

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firefox --kiosk https://yourhomeassistant.url

VNC Setup

Using this guide I installed VNC to aid in remote troubleshooting (so I dont have to plug in a keyboard and mouse again!)

Install TightVNC Server: sudo apt-get install tightvncserver -y

To fix the error about missing fonts: sudo apt-get install xfonts-base -y

Backup!

If you got everything working, hooray! Go you. I would personally take this opportunity to create a backup image of the drive, so that any ‘fiddling’ or corruption that ensues doesn’t cause you too many headaches!