Advice on web aplication

Software & Web Applications
1

Hello gents!

I am back into IT after a long hiatus and some health issues.
Now, the new employer asked me to solve a problem they have at the point of sale.
They want to show on a TV screen the daily menu and signal what item from that list isn’t available anymore.
Something you’ll see on fast food joints, but reduced to the simpliest form.

Now, my approach is twofold:

  1. On a Raspberry Pi install RaspiOS and LAMP stack.(XAAMP set to autostart)
    Develop the phP and HTML pages who connect to the small databases holding the food items.
    Now, at the beggining of the day someone could VNC into the Raspberry from a tablet ( connected to the same network) start Chrome, accces the webpage and choose what items will be on the menu and display them in a HTML table/form.

Pro: from the tablet anyone can select the items and display them onto the TV screen.
Con: developing…took phP and MySQL classes some years before, I have to get on track and develop myself everything from scratch. Or go Fiver on this .

  1. On a Raspberry Pi install RaspiOS and Wordpress. Create the page and then from the webform choose some items.

Pro: no developing
Con: I have to be the one to do the task

I could use some advice here, regarding the whole answer to this problem. Can anyone provide a simpler approach or a better one? If costs are implied, no problem unless we are talking hundreds or higher.

2

We have a client that we simply use a Google Sheet and have it displayed in a similar way. Anyone can go update the sheet on their phone or computer and the changes show up immediately on the screen.

3

Thanks a lot Tom for the time and insight.
My first solution was the same excel spreadsheet route. For the start it could be a temporary solution, but they asked to have this more developed.
But regarding the hardware-conectivity-service setup, looks ok to you?

4

The PI Should work fine for that.

5

A while ago I setup a raspberry pi kiosk which displayed a zabbix dashboard connected to my TV so that I could see which devices were offline. You could create your solution on another device with the option of making it easy to add one-off items / special offers and just point your RPi to a new page.

While a spreadsheet works it doesn’t look pretty, but I do know a few Accenture consultants who can add the pretty :slight_smile:

1 Like
6

Not sure why this link says free when only one or two are actually free:
https://blog.capterra.com/the-top-5-free-inventory-software-systems/

Might find something useful there. Also look at this as an inventory issue ad you might find a few more open source projects that you could deploy.

If you get really fancy, the POS will be able to talk to the inventory and flag things automatically, but might take some time to get there.

7

You could use wordpress and woocommerce

8

If it’s ok that the app requires internet access, you might consider Firebase. If you want to go the PHP route, they have an official PHP library, though I think development in JavaScript is encouraged. Though I’ve never used it personally, just from reading through the library’s docs it seems pretty simple to get started.