Todd Ludington
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Part of HamCation Event Technology Platform

HamCation Display Kiosks

Active since 2026-01

Fleet of Raspberry Pi kiosks showing live event data, managed with Ansible and fed by Server-Sent Events.

Python FastAPI Raspberry Pi Ansible Cloudflare Workers KV

What it does

A fleet of four Raspberry Pi devices running Python/FastAPI clients in Chromium kiosk mode. They show rotating prize info, event schedules, vendor listings, and live winner announcements via Server-Sent Events.

Fleet management

The entire Pi fleet is provisioned and managed with Ansible playbooks that handle Tailscale VPN enrollment, systemd services, boot ordering, and automatic recovery after power loss. A Pi that loses power during the event boots back to a working kiosk state without manual intervention.

Technical details

  • Python/FastAPI local client on each Pi drives Chromium in kiosk mode
  • Server-Sent Events for live updates (prize winners, schedule changes)
  • Cloudflare Workers API serves display data with tiered KV caching
  • Ansible playbooks for fleet provisioning and configuration management
  • Tailscale VPN for remote management during the event
  • systemd services with automatic restart and boot ordering
  • Survives unclean power cycles without manual recovery

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