At the end of last year, PaperCut gave us access to their Raspberry Pi release station image, and we are happy to report it works well when set up with a monitor, keyboard and mouse. On its own this is a great way to have a low-cost, low power release station that can be set up in about 30 minutes but, of course, I like to play with things and see what else can be done.

Over the process of a few weeks, I acquired some extra goodies to attach to the Pi and have ended up with something interesting.

The first toy I got hold of was a 7-inch touchscreen which is easy to setup it just involves connecting a few cables, This was great and allowed me to use the release station without needing a monitor attached to it. The downside was I couldn’t find an onscreen keyboard that worked how I wanted it to, Matchbox-Keyboard seemed to work but was always on screen and wouldn’t hide, and Florence did auto hide, but when using it, the focus was taken away from the input fields.

<span style="line-height: 1.5;"><img class="alignnone size-large wp-image-1974" src="https://staging.selectec.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/onsecreen_keyboard-1024x584.jpg" alt="onsecreen_keyboard" width="660" height="376" /></span>

<span style="line-height: 1.5;">This left us with two options:</span>
<ol>
	<li>Fork the GitHub project for one of the keyboards to add in the missing features</li>
	<li>Build our own Python / TKInter based on-screen keyboard</li>
</ol>
While we would have enjoyed brushing off our Python skills to make a custom PaperCut keyboard it was a little beyond the scope of the project.

This is when I realised I needed a second toy, so we grabbed a PaperCut branded card reader from our stock. With a simple change to the Release Station config file I was able to enable card authentication. The next big test was would the card reader even work on a Pi. The answer… Yes, it did and I didn’t have to install anything else I just plugged it in and everything was working.

So now what we have a Raspberry Pi powered Release Station with a touch screen and a card reader. All of this has been elegently shoved in the box the touch screen came in (no expense spared). There is no need for a keyboard or mouse anymore and I have a neat and unique release station for use with PaperCut.

<img class="alignnone size-large wp-image-1973" src="https://staging.selectec.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/pi_release-1024x614.jpg" alt="pi_release" width="660" height="396" />

If anyone wants to give this a go on their own or has any other ideas of what we could do with a PaperCut Raspberry Pi Release Station get in touch and we will see what we can do. I wonder if I can get the reader and the Pi inside a travel coffee mug…

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