SBC-UI is a piece of software I’ve been working on and using for a while. As it sounds, it presents the user interface and controls the single board computers (mainly Raspberry Pi‘s) that we use around here. Right now it’s just a command-line script that can be setup to start on boot.
We want the UI to be as simple as possible while still doing the job. As the SBC’s we’ve been focusing on first are mostly camera platforms, the UI currently consists of a single button for interaction and an LED for feedback. Configuration for each system is done via INI file.
This has worked fine for testing, the button toggles the condition of the SBC’s configured job, the LED shows whether that job is currently being performed or not. But what if the system is, say, an RPi Zero W, that doesn’t have any pins installed by default.
That led to the most recent functionality updates today, which was Linux signal process interaction. So on the systems that have no button, I merely send the program the USR1 signal in the system, and it acts as if a button was just released.
So now on the Zero W and other systems with no wired buttons it’s easier to control the UI, and this is also accessible to other programs.
The creation of the INI file is done by Ansible, but that’s another post…