When using Wi-Fi the Odoo instance on the POSBox will start after a
Wi-Fi connection is established. This takes a bit longer than when
you're using a wired connection. If Firefox gets started before you
end up with a 'Could not connect to localhost:8069' error.
This adds the hw_screen module which is responsible for receiving
rendered HTML from a POS client and sending it to a running Chromium
browser. This is done by sending Remote Debugging Protocol messages over
a WebSocket provided by Chromium. This allows hw_screen to evaluate
arbitrary JS. This is used to seamlessly (without flickering) update the
browser.
This also includes changes to the POSBox. X, Chromium and some
miscellaneous other programs were added. Functionality was added that
automatically displays a fullscreen, UI-less Chromium browser when the
POSBox starts up. This is accomplished through x_application.sh, which
gets executed only when a display is detected. After the browser starts,
it will display a specific screen until it receives the first order update
from a POS client.
Creates a public controller to be able to display the interface on an external
device not connected to the posbox (e.g. tablet)
Courtesy of JOV, LPE, ODO and MAT
When the POSBox boots without a network cable attached it will
automatically launch a wireless AP that people can connect to. This
allows them to configure what wireless network the POSBox should connect
to.
This wireless AP was configured to use the 10.10.0.0/24 subnet. The AP
itself was on 10.10.0.1. Although this is fine if used as intended it is
a quick way to take down an existing network if you where to plug in an
ethernet cable after the wireless AP has started. 10.10.0.1 is commonly
used by routers all over the world and plugging in a booted POSBox into
their networks will cause serious issues because the POSBox will share
the same IP as the router.
This moves the POSBox AP to the 10.11.12.0/24 subnet, with the AP on
10.11.12.1.
This also makes the DHCP server listen only on wlan0 because otherwise
you can end up with two DHCP servers on the same network which would
still break stuff.
The main reason for doing this is supporting the new Raspberry Pi 3. No
functional changes where made.
For Raspbian Wheezy we used to download the full image and strip it as
best we could to obtain a reasonable image size for people to
download. Since Raspbian Jessie the Raspberry Pi Foundation has started
releasing an official minimal image (Raspbian Jessie Lite) which we will
use from now on to build our image. One downside of this is that the
minimal image is a 1.3 GiB image which is too small for our
purposes so it has to be resized.
Because Raspbian Jessie migrated to systemd we cannot rely on
/etc/init.d/rcS to set up the ramdisks anymore. Jessie provides a
compatibility layer so old SysVinit scripts still work but rcS does not
block like it does in a SysVinit system, it is run in parallel with
other startup services. In our case this is a bad thing as setting up
the ramdisks has to be done before any other services are started. To
accomplish this the rcS hack has been migrated to a systemd service
running before basic.target and with DefaultDependencies=no. This has a
similar effect as the rcS hack because normal systemd services (with
DefaultDependencies=yes) all require basic.target by default.
This allows people to connect the posbox to networks using a wireless
network adapter.
When plugging in a USB Wi-Fi adapter and no network cable, the posbox
will boot and host its own Access Point called "Posbox". Users can
connect their device to this network and can then connect to the posbox
the usual way.
An interface for has been provided that also allows users to instruct
the posbox to connect to a different Wi-Fi network. This is useful when
the client is not running Odoo locally.
It is also possible to make this configuration persistent. With a
persistent Wi-Fi network configuration, the posbox will always try to
connect to the specified network after a reboot.
Attempts have been made to make the Wi-Fi connection as robust as
possible. Upon connection loss, the posbox will automatically attempt to
reconnect.
When the server is answering HTTP requests, the status led (green one)
of the Raspberry Pi will turn on. Contrary to the previous script this
will not exit and keep running every 5 seconds. This way we can easily
troubleshoot connection issues (if led is on and we can't connect it's a
network issue, otherwise it's an issue with Odoo).
Instead of continuing to build upon the old images, these scripts
implement a reproducable way to generate new posbox images. The
generated images will be based on the latest stable Raspbian
release. The image will be created with the help of qemu-system-arm,
which will boot up the image and execute a script that will set up the
posbox image.
This way everything necessary to set up a posbox is readable in the
scripts and accompanying files, instead of being hidden in an image.
Joren Van Onder
Lucas Perais