This is great advice. I have also done some work on building a good user interface using the Pi, and was surprised by how difficult it was. There's no good Android build available for the Pi, for example – would be ideal for many of the kind of UIs you would want to implement.<p>In the end I have been using a Go web server with websockets to display a single-page app in Firefox running under X. It's still not totally satisfactory though – UI is slow due to the lack of HW acceleration, and there is no nice solution for on-screen keyboards, so I'll probably have to implement one in JS eventually. Touch screen support is sketchy at best.<p>Are there other similar platforms out there that might offer HW acceleration or working Android implementations? I also had a crack at the Orange Pi which claims to have functioning Android, but… let's say that's an overstatement.
The problem I found with using RaspberryPi as a server for anything, is that it kills SD cards within a few months. And I've tried with some super expensive Ultra/Extreme cards as well, they all die in 3-4 months of running a web server off it.
This is great. I'm using Pi's for a similar purpose, a bunch of monitoring dashboards all over our office that pull from webpages. I'm using a combination of a central server to configure which web pages are shown, and a chrome extension on each Pi to periodically ping the server.<p>It's really hard to find a decently new version of chrome for Arm. Raspbian stable is on an ancient Chrome 22.0 and even testing is only up to 38.0. So I'm excited to try out this method with Qt.