Setup a Raspberry Pi Kiosk in Minutes with FullPageOS

Have you ever wanted a display in your home that plays your favorite pictures or videos on repeat, or shows a dashboard you check regularly? If you have a Raspberry Pi, setting up this display is easier than ever with FullPageOS. Here’s how you can do it.

FullPageOS can be directly selected and flashed onto an SD card using the Raspberry Pi Imager software. After that, image, video, or custom website links can be set up to be displayed on the Raspberry Pi on boot.

You get a big full-screen website opened on a browser window without hassles. Cool, right? Let’s start by knowing a bit more about FullPageOS.

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What is FullPageOS and a Kiosk?

The kiosk is a display (whether interactive or not) that shows things like advertisements, images, videos, information, etc. It is generally used for advertising in public places so that the customers and people visiting get to know more about the services or products available.

A Raspberry Pi is a very cost-effective and ideal choice for powering this kiosk. There are numerous software available specifically for this purpose. Some of them have already been covered on RaspberryTips:

• Installing DAKboard on Raspberry Pi (Customizable Displays)
• Install Anthias by Screenly on Raspberry Pi (Digital signage)

However, if you want to display some images or a webpage, setting these up would be overkill. That is where FullPageOS comes to your rescue! You can set everything up in minutes and still get a nice, working personal display for yourself or your business.

Let’s start with the actual tutorial now. For the requirements, all you will need is the following:

• Raspberry Pi: Good News! You will need a Raspberry Pi 2 or newer model (unfortunately, the Pi Zero isn’t supported). I suggest using a Raspberry Pi 4 with at least 2 GB RAM, which is what I used.
• A computer with an SD card reader (can be a Raspberry Pi with Imager on it).
  You can use a cheap USB adapter if you don’t have one (like this one on Amazon).
• A micro-SD card to install the latest Raspberry Pi OS on the Raspberry Pi.
  Here is my current recommendation for the best performance, but any model will do for this tutorial as it aims to show you how to install and setup Tailscale on your Pi.
• Monitor or Display: You should have a display on which you can display the webpage or images you set up. Moreover, if you want to interact with your webpage, you need a keyboard and mouse connected to your Pi.
• Raspberry Pi Imager: We will use the Imager software to flash the FullPageOS image onto our SD card.

Great! Now that we are all squared up, let’s start with the actual installation steps.

FullPageOS Installation Instructions

There are no specific installation steps we need to perform for this tutorial as we have FullPageOS available as an option on the Raspberry Pi Imager. All you need to do is select that option and you are good to go on the flashing part! Cool, right? Let’s start the process.

Flashing OS Image on SD Card

If you want to download the image manually, you can do so by visiting FullPageOS’s official GitHub page and then flashing the downloaded image using Imager or Balena Etcher.

I will walk you through the process of flashing this OS using the Raspberry Pi Imager.

• Open the Raspberry Pi Imager software. Choose the Raspberry Pi device you are using. I will choose the Raspberry Pi 4 as it’s the model I am using.
  
  
  
• Once that is done, the next step is choosing the OS Image. Just click on the CHOOSE OS button.
  
  
  
• This will open a new Operating System window. Scroll to the bottom and select the Other specific-purpose OS.
  
  
  
• Under that, you have to search and click on the FullPageOS option.
  
  
  
• This will open the final window which shows the OS options. You will see both the stable and Nightly versions for the OS. For this tutorial, let’s stick with the stable version so that there are no surprises.
  
  
  
• Once you have selected the OS, insert your SD card, click CHOOSE STORAGE, and select your SD card from the list of available choices.
  
  
• Once you have completed everything, click the Next button.
  Select “No” for customization settings as we don’t need any.
• Then, this will open a window informing you that everything on this SD card will be erased. Confirm by pressing YES.
  
  
  
• This will start the flashing process. The system may prompt you to enter your password to start the process.
  
  
• It will take a few minutes to complete so be patient. Once the process is complete, the SD card automatically ejects from your system.

With this, we have successfully set up our SD card for the Raspberry Pi. Next, let’s see what setup steps we need for this OS (trust me, it’s very little).

First Steps with FullPageOS

Before you add this SD card to your Pi, there are some things you need to set up: what website to show or what image/video to display on your display! You have two options: directly set it up from your main system or use SSH. We will keep things simple and use our PC to complete this.

There are two main steps involved in the pre-boot setup process:

• Setting up a Wi-Fi connection
• First Boot

So, let’s start.

Setup Wi-Fi Connection

We will set up the Pi to connect to our Wi-Fi network so that we have to option to SSH into our system in case we need to (as there is no user interface you can use to set up things).

• First, reinsert your SD card into the card slot (you might need to remove and reinsert) so it shows up as a boot drive on your system.
  
  
• Locate the file named fullpageos-wpa-supplicant.txt and open it in an editor of your choice (I suggest VS Code or Sublime Text).
  
  
• Next, we will modify the network section and enter our Wi-Fi credentials instead of the default text.
  Enter your Wi-Fi network name in ssid and password in the psk section.
  
  
• Once you have completed this, save the file and that’s it.

You have successfully set up your Pi’s Wi-Fi connectivity settings. When your Pi boots, it will connect to your configured network.

First Boot

By default, if you boot your OS at this step, you should see the default FullPageOS webpage that they have set as shown below (Note that the first boot will take some time, so be patient).

Scanning the link will take you to the documentation page which shows how to set up links in FullPageOS. Here is the link for the documentation for your reference.

That’s it! You have FullPageOS running on your Pi.

Now, let’s see how to make configuration changes to change what we see on our display.

Customize your Website View

This section will cover the different customizations for your Pi’s display with FullPageOS. In particular, we will mainly focus on these two options:

• Displaying a Website/Dashboard
• Displaying a Video

Before we start with the above options, let’s see how we can SSH into our Pi running FullPageOS to make our lives easier (we won’t have to unplug the SD card every time we want to make changes).

SSH Access

SSH Access for the Pi lets you access the OS via a terminal window on your main computer. Here is the link to my tutorial where I go into the details of SSH on a Raspberry Pi.

For FullPageOS, the good news is that SSH is enabled by default.

So, once you start the Pi, you can connect to it with a computer or device on the same network as your Pi. Here are all the details you will need to establish an SSH connection.

• Address: fullpageos.local (you can also use your Pi’s IP Address if you know it).
• Username: pi
• Password: raspberry (I highly recommend you change it for security).

Once you open a terminal, all you need to do is execute the following command: ssh pi@raspberrypi.local and use the default password to establish an SSH connection. You will be able to make configuration changes without removing your SD card.

So, let’s start with the first option of setting up a website to be displayed on your screen on boot.

Option 1: Display a Custom Website/Dashboard

In most cases, if you want an interactive display, you will want to display your favorite or most visited website. Or if you have a smart device, you would want a digital dashboard of it available at all times. In any case, you will have to follow the steps given below:

• From the terminal where you SSH’ed into your Pi, go into the boot directory and locate the file named fullpageos.txt as we will make our configuration changes in that. You can use the following commands:
  
  cd /boot
ls -l full*
  
  
  
• Now, copy the link of the website you would like to show on your display (it should be accessible through the public internet) and change the link in this file to change what your display should show. (I am choosing the RaspberryTips website, of course!).
  
  You can do this using the following command:
  
  sudo vi fullpageos.txt
  
  Then, press “i” on your keyboard and paste the link, after which you can press “i” again and the “:wq” to save the file (I have a tutorial about Vim here that can help if you’re a bit lost with this text editor).
  
  
  
• That is all! Easy, right? Now, you can restart the Pi from the terminal or just unplug it and then power it again so that our display shows the updated website.
  
  
  
• Alternatively, you can set up a dashboard to be displayed on this screen. All you need to do is change the link in the text file to point to your dashboard (something like this).
  
  

Option 2: Display a Video

Now, let’s see how to display a video (in full screen) on our display. It may seem a bit complex, but don’t worry, we will go step-by-step so that the process isn’t overwhelming.

• For this, the first step is to get the URL for the video you want to play on your PiDisplay (it has a nice ring to it, right?).
• I will choose one of my YouTube videos for this tutorial.
  Open the video and then you should see the link for it in your address bar.
  
  The link should be something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6sNzmO4pwY.
  
  
  
• However, one thing to note is opening this link opens the YouTube platform, not the full-screen video. For that, we will need to make some changes to this link. Here is what the final link should look like:
  
  
  You can grab the unique ID for your video from the above image and add the additional options by adding a “?” after the link. For now, I have added the autoplay and video quality options. If you want to show a video in some landscape, you can even add the mute option which disables sound (add mute=1).
  
• Once you have your video link, paste it into your fullpageos.txt file and save.
  Then follow the same process. Your video should automatically start playing.
  
  

This marks the end of this tutorial. You now know how to use FullPageOS, including everything from installation to configuring how to show different web pages and videos on your FullPageOS Pi display.

Thank you for reading this article. See you in the next one!

Whenever you’re ready, here are other ways I can help you:

The RaspberryTips Community: If you want to hang out with me and other Raspberry Pi fans, you can join the community. I share exclusive tutorials and behind-the-scenes content there. Premium members can also visit the website without ads.

Master your Raspberry Pi in 30 days: If you are looking for the best tips to become an expert on Raspberry Pi, this book is for you. Learn useful Linux skills and practice multiple projects with step-by-step guides.

The Raspberry Pi Bootcamp: Understand everything about the Raspberry Pi, stop searching for help all the time, and finally enjoy completing your projects.

Master Python on Raspberry Pi: Create, understand, and improve any Python script for your Raspberry Pi. Learn the essentials step-by-step without losing time understanding useless concepts.

You can also find all my recommendations for tools and hardware on this page.