Raspberry Pi 3, kiosk mode, and enterprise WiFi

I recently set up a Rapsberry Pi to display a website on a 60” TV in my office. It is displaying a slideshow of various sales metrics (being served up from another Raspberry Pi, coincidentally).

I could have used the built-in Samsung browser, but that had some issues - mainly that the TV won’t connect to enterprise WiFi. Also, I liked the flexiblity of having full control over what was being displayed on the TV - RetroPie, anyone?

So, the Raspberry Pi:

Connects to our enterprise WiFi network at boot.
Boots directly into Chromium in kiosk mode and loads the website that I want to display.

Connecting to enterprise WiFi

This guide from @chatchavan was enormously helpful. Of course, using a Pi 3 I didn’t have to worrry about dongles or anything like that.

I am summarizing most of it below, focusing on the enterprise aspect.

wpa_supplicant.conf edits

In order to connect to enterprise WiFi, you need to make changes to /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf and /etc/network/interface. Pretty straight forward.

As always, make a backup of your configuration files!

Note that @chatchavan recommends hashing your password - I tried this, but it did not connect with the hashed password. But it did connect with my password in clear text (eek). I don’t know if this is due to the Pi, or my office network. I need to do some more digging. However, the Pi is only accessible via SSH so I’m okay with this for the moment.

Give hashing it a go on your system - your WiFi might be different than mine.

echo -n 'YOUR_PASSWORD' | iconv -t utf16le | openssl md4

The output will be something like (stdin)= 31d6cfe0d16ae931b73c59d7e0c089c0 - the string after the equals sign is your hash. After hashing your password, clear input history with history -c

Use sudo to open /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf and add the following for enterprise configuration:

network={
    ssid="YOUR_NETWORK_NAME"
    proto=RSN
    key_mgmt=WPA-EAP
    pairwise=CCMP TKIP
    group=CCMP TKIP
    identity="YOUR_USER_NAME"
    password=hash:YOUR_PASSWORD_HASH
    phase1="peaplabel=0"
    phase2="auth=MSCHAPV2"
}

If you are not hasing your password, the password line will read as

    password="YOUR_PASSWORD"

interface edits

sudo edit /etc/network/interface. In the block for wlan0, replace the text there with the following:

auto wlan0
allow-hotplug wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
	pre-up wpa_supplicant -B -Dwext -i wlan0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
	post-down killall -q wpa_supplicant

Restart WiFi

Restart wlan0 with:

sudo ifdown wlan0
sudo ifup wlan0

…aaaand you should be connected to your enterprise wifi!

Boot into Chromium in kiosk mode

In order to boot Chromium into kiosk mode, we just need to add a file to ./config/autostart - which I didn’t know existed until I started digging to figure out how to do this! Yay learning! This is summarized from this StackExchange post.

First, you need Chromium:

sudo apt-get install chromium-browser

Then, create the Chromium autostart file with your editor of choice:

nano ~./config/autostart/autoChromium.desktop

And enter the following into the file:

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Exec=/usr/bin/chromium-browser --noerrdialogs --disable-session-crashed-bubble --disable-infobars --kiosk http://www.website.com
Hidden=false
X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=true
Name[en_US]=AutoChromium
Name=AutoChromium
Comment=Start Chromium when GNOME starts

Problems

Despite setting --disable-session-crashed-bubble, I have still gotten this error message intermittently. But if I SSH into the Pi and reboot, it boots back into kiosk mode without that message appearing.

Also, getting Chromium out of kiosk mode is a bit of a pain - only way I’ve been able to do it is to remove the autoChromium.desktop file, and reboot. However, as this Pi is dedicated to just loading and displaying a webpage, that is not something I need to do…really ever. Only if I want to do something else on a 60” TV in the office!