Help needed for setting up customer touchscreen

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pbee50

37 posts

Geek

#103175 31-May-2012 21:21

I have quite a good touchscreen going to waste so thought i would connect it up to a little eeebox i have and use it for customers who enter my shop to enter their email and go into a draw. Purpose of this is to gather as much emails as i can in order to send them a monthly specials newsletter.

Anyway how do i create a welcome screen with an invitation for customers to enter their emails into a text box and then on submission for the email to be recorded in a spreadsheet or text document.

I assume there is specialist software for this or is it designed in a graphics application and then somehow made to work on a touchscreen.

Any help would be appreciated

jbard

1377 posts

Uber Geek

#633714 31-May-2012 21:25

If you have a website already you could just setup a simple web page and run it full screen in chrome. Not sure about on screen keyboard though?

Edit: for it to store them in a database you would need to either run it online or setup apache/php/mysql on the computer which isn't easy if you haven't done it before.

nickb800

2715 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#633716 31-May-2012 21:36

You could get a free Google Docs (Drive?) account and create a 'form'. This will be hosted on the internet by google and generates a spreadsheet entry each time someone submits the form, which you can then export into your email software.

A (not so pretty) example for similar purpose (catching email addresses) can be found here https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dFJSTGJzWWt3Zmt5bFhlUlJLQlNHVlE6MQ#gid=0

pbee50

37 posts

Geek

#633718 31-May-2012 21:45

thanks - seems like a great way of doing it

Will a keyboard pop-up when the text box is touched ? If so then should be a breeze i think. I will test it out

jbard

1377 posts

Uber Geek

#633719 31-May-2012 21:46

pbee50: thanks - seems like a great way of doing it

Will a keyboard pop-up when the text box is touched ? If so then should be a breeze i think. I will test it out

No put windows has a built in on screen keyboard you can use. Just search for keyboard in the start items menu.

jbard

1377 posts

Uber Geek

#633720 31-May-2012 21:48

Also not sure if you can use these on a google docs app but these are a couple of on screen keyboards made in HTML/Javascript - would work better than the on screen keyboard:

http://www.dncompute.com/blog/2006/06/21/on-screen-keyboard.html
http://www.808.dk/?code-javascriptkeyboard

pbee50

37 posts

Geek

#634046 1-Jun-2012 11:56

thanks for that jbard

One issue upon second thoughts that may make a live google docs page a problem is that how can i stop customers from navigating away from that google docs page as its just a browser window after all. Im sure some customers will figure that out and go browsing while their waiting for their orders and what page its left on could be anyones guess and my risk.

Is their anyway of fixing the window or another method of displaying a form ?

jbard

1377 posts

Uber Geek

#634052 1-Jun-2012 12:01

pbee50: thanks for that jbard

One issue upon second thoughts that may make a live google docs page a problem is that how can i stop customers from navigating away from that google docs page as its just a browser window after all. Im sure some customers will figure that out and go browsing while their waiting for their orders and what page its left on could be anyones guess and my risk.

Is their anyway of fixing the window or another method of displaying a form ?

If you set the browser to full screen mode in google chrome they have no address/search bar so can't navigate away. They only problem here is if they press F11 then they could exit out of full screen mode. I don't think those on screen keyboards have the F keys though so should be sweet.

The other option is to use firefox as their are a number of kiosk add ons that stop people browsing away from the site and lock the browser down to full screen mode only.

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pbee50

37 posts

Geek

#634066 1-Jun-2012 12:19

as it happens im a firefox fan - thats a great solution

thankyou :)