I've been considering rolling my own around a Raspberry Pi, but I'm not sure how dependable they are. Does anyone have any advice on that front?
More generally, if you're looking at POS systems, the new hotness is to just use a tablet. Solves the display problem quite easily. USB barcorde scanners usually work as keyboards, so it's not hard to get set up.
If you're looking to do it with a Pi, there are small screens for the device, but I think the parts total will quickly get higher than a low-end Android tablet.
You can get an Amazon Fire tablet for around $50. Offbrand Chinese ones are even cheaper.
Think about having a custom linux setup compared to Windows. There's some extra stability in one angle, but your wifi stops working every full moon and your keyboard layout gets randomized on reboot.
Though the advantage of building it yourself is that you can replace more specific parts.
When we first looked at the market, we realized that no-one really knew how it worked because it's still very young. So we decided to compete on price and reliability. Instead of lock-in contracts and up-front hardware purchases, we charge a small month-to-month rental and the hardware remains ours.
All they were used for was displaying a webpage that showed the schedule for a given room in the building so the Cisco boxes were always overkill (and the browser built into it was terrible to boot).
So I put together a test setup on a RasPi that just boots LXDE in kiosk mode, opens Chromium with no...er...chrome on the windows and with no mouse cursor, etc, loads the page for that room, and the page itself handles refreshes. Set a cron job to reboot every morning at 4am in case there was any scheduled maintenance done on the server delivering the webpage overnight. Can SSH in to change things and also set up a node.js script I found that allows me to open a URL in my browser and trigger a reboot or shutdown.
All of this was new to me but in the end, I replaced twenty $1500 boxes with twenty $55 kits and it was an excuse to learn/brush up on some things. The best part is that they look even better now because the Cisco boxes could only go up to 1366x768 and now the displays are running at native resolution. The down side is that this isn't a private company (state university) so I don't get any sort of bonus for saving them almost $30k :(
If you expect this in the private world, you are going to have a very bad time :)
Other things you will probably want are a programmable keyboard, NCR 78 or Datalogic 9800i, coin dispenser & an integrated pinpad for processing credit/debit.
Yeah, I'm looking at having a printer controlled cash draw. I don't need a bar code scanner. A Raspberry Pi touch display. And some sort of pinpad hardware and payment processing service I can integrate with. I think that's "all" I need for what I have in mind.
Eh, that is really vague, if you could be more specific I could help ya more.
> I'm looking at having a printer controlled cash draw.
No reason not to use the printer to control the cash drawer, every receipt printer you look at will support 1 if not 2 cash drawers.
> I don't need a bar code scanner.
Do you only have a few items which you intend to have on a touchscreen?
>A Raspberry Pi touch display.
How big/how high resolution?
> And some sort of pinpad
Look at the Pax Px7 or Dejavoo, we wrote PHP bindings for Pax's API. Would recommend you avoid Datacap, most semi-integrated credit/debit offerings are a pretty penny besides the two I mentioned.
This is all just spitballing though. I'm literally just considering it.
I did purchase an industrial USB Hub though because there were too many USB peripherals drawing too much current.