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Drab
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Ask HN: Does anyone here makes sw for kiosks, infotainments or similar?
That's basically what I did for some screens around the office (before covid sent us to remote work) - elixir backend with a raspberry pi on the back of each TV, then Drab[0] to update the screen over websockets (liveview wasn't a thing then IIRC)
[0] https://tg.pl/drab
screens
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Ask HN: Does anyone here makes sw for kiosks, infotainments or similar?
I work on a team building an application that displays real-time predictions/service alerts and other stuff on various types of strictly non-interactive screens posted around the MBTA’s* bus and rapid transit network.
Like others in the comments, we use a pretty straightforward architecture—our backend is written in Elixir and the frontend is rendered as a webpage with HTML/TypeScript/SCSS. We also use AWS Polly for on-demand readouts of the same content. The client periodically requests new data from the server—no web sockets involved for now.
The kiosk part is pretty basic; most of the interesting problems we face are related to the fact that we support a large variety of screen types/formats and need to strictly adhere to ADA guidelines (for both type size and audio equivalence). Screen types include solar-powered e-ink, portrait mode 1080p LCD, twin side-by-side portrait LCDs, and a set of screens owned by an ad vendor, on which our content appears in a rotation alongside ads.
The codebase is open-source! https://github.com/mbta/screens
* (Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority)
What are some alternatives?
floki - Floki is a simple HTML parser that enables search for nodes using CSS selectors.
chilipie-kiosk - Easy-to-use Raspberry Pi image for booting directly into full-screen Chrome, with built-in convenience features for unattended operation. Perfect for dashboards and build monitors.
Meeseeks - An Elixir library for parsing and extracting data from HTML and XML with CSS or XPath selectors.
html_sanitize_ex - HTML sanitizer for Elixir
html_entities - Elixir module for decoding HTML entities.
modest_ex - Elixir library to do pipeable transformations on html strings (with CSS selectors)
myhtmlex - Elixir/Erlang bindings for lexborisov's myhtml
tidy_ex - Elixir binding to the granddaddy of HTML tools
Claper - The ultimate tool to interact with your audience
machinist - A small Elixir lib to write state machines
elixir-type_check - TypeCheck: Fast and flexible runtime type-checking for your Elixir projects.
xlsxir - Xlsx parser for the Elixir language.