MonitorPI

Motion-activated Raspberry Pi kiosk for a wall-mounted web dashboard.

This kiosk was built for a 7" Raspberry Pi touch display showing a custom Netdata dashboard sized for the screen. Point KIOSK_URL at any full-page URL; the motion sensor only controls display power, not the browser session.

Photos

How it works

1. On boot, a systemd user service runs kiosk.sh.
2. kiosk.sh hides the cursor (unclutter), starts the motion script, and launches Chromium in kiosk mode to your URL.
3. motion-sensor-screen.py watches a PIR sensor on GPIO 17. Motion turns the display on via xset dpms; after idle time with no motion, the display turns off. Chromium keeps running in the background.

Hardware

• Raspberry Pi with Raspberry Pi OS (desktop)
• 7" touch display (or any HDMI display)
• PIR motion sensor on BCM GPIO 17 (default; configurable)

See docs/images for wiring photos when available.

Software prerequisites

On the Pi:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y chromium unclutter x11-xserver-utils python3 python3-rpi.gpio

On older Raspberry Pi OS images the browser package may be named chromium-browser instead of chromium. The kiosk script tries both.

Optional: install Python dependencies with pip:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Configuration

cp config.example.env config.env

Edit config.env:

Variable	Description
KIOSK_URL	Full URL for Chromium kiosk mode (e.g. your Netdata dashboard)
DISPLAY	X display (usually :0)
PIR_GPIO	BCM GPIO pin for PIR output (default 17)
IDLE_SECONDS	Turn display off after this many seconds without motion
POLL_SECONDS	How often to read the PIR (default 5)
CHROMIUM_PREFS	Path to Chromium Preferences file for crash-banner cleanup

config.env is gitignored — do not commit it.

Installation

1. Clone this repo on the Pi, for example:

   git clone https://github.com/sebastientaggart/MonitorPI.git /home/pi/MonitorPI
   cd /home/pi/MonitorPI

2. Create and edit config.env as above.

3. Make the launcher executable:

   chmod +x kiosk.sh motion-sensor-screen.py

4. Install the systemd user service:

   mkdir -p ~/.config/systemd/user
   cp systemd/monitorpi-kiosk.service.example ~/.config/systemd/user/monitorpi-kiosk.service

   Edit ~/.config/systemd/user/monitorpi-kiosk.service if your install path is not /home/pi/MonitorPI.

5. Enable and start:

   systemctl --user daemon-reload
   systemctl --user enable --now monitorpi-kiosk.service

6. If the kiosk should start at boot without an interactive login:

   sudo loginctl enable-linger pi

Netdata dashboards

The dashboard HTML is served by Netdata (or your own server), not by this repo. MonitorPI only opens a URL in Chromium.

A sample custom dashboard for a 7" 800×600 screen lives in the repo as reference code:

• docs/netdata-dashboard-800x600.html — copy into a Netdata web root, then point KIOSK_URL at that URL.

This setup (OPNsense + Unraid/tower):

Role	Host	Web root	Notes
Serve kiosk HTML	firewall.lan (OPNsense)	/usr/local/share/netdata/web/	Plugin install; only index.html, static/, v3/, etc. — no dashboard.js
Serve chart library	tower.lan	/usr/share/netdata/web/ (typical)	Full agent install; has dashboard.js and refresh-badges.js

The sample HTML is hosted on the firewall (e.g. taggart.html) but loads dashboard.js from tower. Each chart still sets data-host to the agent that owns the metrics (firewall.lan or tower.lan).

Example kiosk URL: http://firewall.lan:19999/taggart.html

Verify a host has the legacy chart library:

curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}\n" http://tower.lan:19999/dashboard.js    # expect 200
curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}\n" http://firewall.lan:19999/dashboard.js # OPNsense: often 404

Verify chart IDs if a widget stays blank: curl -s http://<host>:19999/api/v1/charts | jq 'keys[]'

For data-netdata options, see the legacy custom dashboard docs (v2.2.3 tag).

Troubleshooting

Problem	Things to check
Display stays off	PIR wiring and GPIO pin in config.env; run motion-sensor-screen.py manually and watch for xset errors
Chromium “didn’t shut down correctly” bar	CHROMIUM_PREFS path; kiosk.sh patches prefs on start if the file exists
Blank or wrong page	KIOSK_URL reachable from the Pi (curl the URL)
Nothing on screen	DISPLAY=:0; desktop session running; service logs: journalctl --user -u monitorpi-kiosk.service -f
Restart kiosk	systemctl --user restart monitorpi-kiosk.service

Useful manual commands (also in comments at the bottom of kiosk.sh):

DISPLAY=:0 xset dpms force on
DISPLAY=:0 xset dpms force off
pkill -o chromium

License

MIT License