Creating a Automated Kiosk with Firefox and GWT on Windows XP

My task for today was to create a kiosk application. In particular this application is meant to monitor the energy consumption of common appliances in an office. For that matter it uses the Ploggs sensor nodes and a Google Web Toolkit Application.

Now, the setting is such that the GWT application has to be displayed on a screen of a computer dedicated to that application. The monitoring app has to be running the whole day in full-screen mode without anybody doing anything with the browser but see and surf on the page(s) you selected.

This is what’s commonly called a kiosk application. Now, here are the steps I went through to setup the kiosk, note that the computer runs Windows XP Pro SP 3:

1) Install Firefox and download the R-Kiosk plugin. This guy starts Firefox in fullscreen mode and does not allow the user to use/display any menu. Note that after installing this plugin you won’t be able to use Firefox normally unless you start it in Safe Mode (Mozilla Firefox (Safe Mode) in your start menu).
More info on that matter on: http://samanathon.com/firefox-2s-kiosk-mode/ and http://davidstoker.org/blog/tag/r-kiosk/

2) Schedule Windows to start Firefox and everything else you need on startup:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308569
If, just like me, you keep getting the: “0×80070005: Access is denied” error message when trying to schedule a task then try the option “Run only if logged in” and schedule the task to start “At Logon”.
Note that if you want everything to start auto-magically, without user involvement, you should not set a user password.

3) For this kiosk we want everything to be automated which means we need two more scheduled tasks:

Shutdown: this is quite straightforward using the shutdown command (yeah, even Windows has got things like that!). Create a batch file containing the shutdown command:

cd\
shutdown -s -f -t 30

Which says: shutdown this computer (-s), force all apps to close (-f) and do that in 30 seconds (-t)
Now, all you need to do is to schedule that to happen everyday at, say, 8 o’clock (see http://samanathon.com/windows-tip-shutdown-your-computer-with-a-batch-file)
More info on the shutdown command on: and http://www.yinfor.com/blog/archives/2007/04/schedule_to_shutdown_your_wind.html

Startup: now that’s a bit more tricky since we need to wake up a computer that’s … shutdown, i.e. no chance do it by scheduling a Windows task!
The answer to that is: BIOS. Well at least most BIOS offer a wake-on-schedule functionality. In our case the BIOS of the Intel Desktop Board D945GCLF offers it. All I had to do was to hit F2 at startup (i.e. access the BIOS) and enable the “Wake on Alarm” option to 8 o’clock in the morning which did the trick…

4) Last but not least (this is an edit since I noticed that this morning when the kiosk screen turned black!): you need to be sure that the PC does not turn off the screen after a while. The best-thing to do is to activate the Presentation mode in Control Panel -> Power Options -> Power Scheme and select Presentation.