Innov'Box

Work in progress !

Purpose

The innov'box is a connected suggestion box : suggestions are posted (by anybody, anonymously) on a web front end and printed inside the box. A video feedback allows the poster to see the printed ticket falling inside the box.

The innov'box is made of a raspberry pie with a camera and a Zebra KR403 kiosk printer.

How it works

The node application is running on the raspberry pi. The camera and the printer are connected to the raspberry.

• Printing is made in ZPL using cups in raw mode.
• The video is made using raspicam in time-lapse mode. The resulting jpg is watched (with fs.watch) and for each new image, the whole file is sent through a socket.io connection with the front end.

The back-end is made with nodejs, and exposes :

• A json-server router to print the suggestion to a json file
• A paremeter service to forward any configuration variable to the front end
• Static resources for the front end

The front end is made with Polymer 1.0 web components.

Install

Install cups and configure the Zebra printer in Raw queue.

npm install -g innov-box

On some distribution, the libcups2-dev package may be required for node-printer.

sudo apt-get install libcups2-dev

Usage

innov-box <web-port> <socket-port> <json-database-path> <time-lapse-image-path> <printer-cups-name> <log-file-path>

• web-port : local port on which the services and static resources are served
• socket-port : local port of the socket.io server
• json-database-path : path to the json file used as a database with lowdb
• time-lapse-image-path : path where the time lapse image is written
• printer-cups-name : name of the Zebra printer in CUPS configuration
• log-file-path : path to the log file of the http server (combined logs)

License

MIT © bcolombani