Phrank's Ubuntu Blog

Here's the idea - Have a dedicated computer/kiosk that displays the latest home automation notifications.
It's pretty simple - Use a full screen webbrowser for display - write a .cgi script that updates each time it's run.

So I have home automation events logged to a text file on the server like so:

The cgi web script grabs the last three events and displays them. The web page automatically refreshes every second.

For the kiosk, I have the user login on startup, and run firefox on login.
I use the Full Fullscreen extension to start firefox in fullscreen - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1568
And set the home page to the home automation server cgi script.

To hide the mouse cursor (in WinXP), I made a 1x1 transparent ico file and renamed it to a .cur file and set it as the cursor.

Now we get live updates in an easy-to-see location!