We are developing a Snap! arcade - a physical enclosure for a project in which students first create the game in Snap! (an educational programming language developed at the University of California, Berkeley that is used by more than a thousand K-12 computer science teachers).
We’re running a local instance of Snap! on a Raspberry Pi 3. This is the first time we have used a Raspberry Pi in a project, but it is working well for this application.
We would like to be able to hide the title bar of the browser to create an “Arcade Mode”. Does anyone on this forum have experience with Raspberry Pi or know how to mask the title bar in the browser on this system? (Thanks)
Here’s the current prototype for the arcade cabinet. We’re using a Raspberry Pico as a microcontroller to monitor the arcade controls. The Pico is connected to a Raspberry Pi running the Snap! program.
Nice work! I love Snap! and the Snap4Arduino fork is great for controlling Arduino hardware.
Also, if you really want it to run like a dedicated arcade machine there’s a way to make the web browser the default application on startup. It’s been years since I ran something like this but it’s out in google-land. Ask if you can’t find it.
Make sure your Raspberry Pi is connected to the internet and has the latest updates installed.
Open the Terminal and run the following command to update the package list:
sudo apt-get update
Next, run the following command to install Chromium:
sudo apt-get install chromium-browser
Once the installation is complete, run the following command to launch Chromium:
chromium-browser
Chromium should now launch and you can use it to browse the web. Close Chromium once you’re done.
To make Chromium launch automatically on start-up, run the following command to open the autostart file:
sudo nano /etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE-pi/autostart
Add the following line to the end of the file:
@chromium-browser
This will tell the Raspberry Pi to launch Chromium on start-up.
Save the file by pressing “Ctrl+X”, then “Y”, then “Enter”.
Reboot the Raspberry Pi by running the following command:
sudo reboot
Once the Raspberry Pi has rebooted, Chromium should launch automatically on start-up.
Note: Depending on your Raspberry Pi configuration, the autostart file location may differ. If you’re using a different desktop environment or window manager, you may need to modify the autostart file for that environment.
However, when we attempt to launch chromium on startup and run this specific script, it tries to connect to the internet (unsuccessfully) instead of going to the local file.