With these instructions, you can easily build a low-power single-page browser when all you have is a fairly basic Raspberry Pi board. The webserver runs in Heroku cloud, but we wager that, with such a minimal install, it could as well run on the device itself. In place of Chromium, you can install Midori, which is a lean browser that works quite well in single-website mode, and shows you how to make it autostart, as well as the little quirks that make sure your display doesn’t go to sleep. Starting with Raspbian Lite, a distribution that doesn’t ship with any desktop features by default, he shows how to equip it with a minimal GUI – no desktop environment needed, just an X server with the OpenBox window manager, as you don’t need more for a kiosk mode application. Not to give up, gives us a step-by-step breakdown on creating a low-footprint Raspbian install showing a single webpage. Sadly, all he could get was single-1 GHz-core 512MB-RAM Zero W boards, which he found unable to run Chromium well enough given the stock Raspbian Desktop install, let alone a webserver alongside it. wanted to build a magic mirror with a web-based frontend, and a modern enough Raspberry Pi would’ve worked just fine.
For quite a few hackers out there, it’s still hard to find a decently powerful Raspberry Pi for a non-eye-watering price.
