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My goal is to develop an interactive kiosk with only touchscreen available to visitors for a local museum. I must admit that I'm a freshman in this part of hardware world, but I really like the sound of this challenge, so I need to get some info/advice first about kiosk's components.

Regarding to the software part, I'm going to use an Arch Linux OS and develop my own kiosk software for the most minimalistic framework possible. I opt for making an app based on WebGL (because I believe this is my forte), so WebGL Hardware Acceleration must be supported by GPU. In case WebGL would be too heavy, my emergency plan is to build a good HTML site or a standalone Java app (which could be the hardest way, but more efficient).

So now about the hardware:

The screen is covered here Choosing the right hardware for an interactive kiosk - screen

Next, what about the computer? I thought about something like Hummingbird i2 or Cubox-i4Pro so it would support at least OpenGL 2.0, Wi-Fi adapter, keyboard and all those things and which would be ready to install the OS on it. Also it needs to be compatible with the chosen touchscreen.

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A Raspberry Pi might be an option, esp. considering it's low power consumption, as well as low cost. WebGL is somewhat experimental, but HTML or Java would work.

The Pi 2 has good specs ($35 gives you 1GB RAM and a quadcore CPU), and additionally it has a large community around it so many things are better documented and better supported. Additionally, Linux is very well supported and works well, in contrast to some other similar devices.

You will need to get a USB WiFi adapter as well as a (micro)SD card for storage.

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    Just modify it so that after booting it unpacks essentials to a ramdisk and makes the SD card read-only. Otherwise you will run into filesystem corruption problems sooner or later if the device is e.g. switched off for the night.
    – SF.
    Commented Sep 22, 2015 at 8:37
  • Using a ramdisk might be a good idea, but will reduce the amount of ram available to your application, esp. if you are using one of the older Raspberry Pi models. If you shut it down properly instead of pulling the power, you'll be fine. The Pi is also great because you can simply swap out the SD card if it goes bad / gets corrupted (make sure you have a spare one preloaded with your software). cc @SF.
    – Jonas Czech
    Commented Sep 29, 2015 at 9:41
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You might consider looking for a used point of sale system. I've played with PARs, Microses, and Alohas and have never had any trouble with Debian. Even the touchscreens generally work with out of the box installations. Certainly not as fuel efficient as a Pi (though POSes do still use processors designed for efficiency rather than performance), but definitely a little more robust. They also depreciate VERY quickly. You can get one with decent processing power for cheap on the ebay, and parts for the more popular models are usually plentiful.

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