Desk Wick — touchscreen market terminal for Raspberry Pi

What it does

Everything on screen is a tile in a grid you lay out yourself — a live quote, a candlestick chart, a clock, a macro button, a gauge, a jump to another page. Swipe between pages of them. Hold any tile to move it, change its symbol, or throw it away.

Grid of live quote tiles — Quote tiles — price, change, sparkline, staleness.

ASCII candlestick chart beside a clock and a page jump tile — Chart, clock and page jump — same grid, no separate screens.

Grid of large macro buttons — Macro page — destructive buttons need a press-and-hold.

Drag and drop layout editor with a macro tile selected — Editor — drag tiles and bind macros from any browser.

Charts that go deeper

Tap a ticker for candles, with the usual indicators, timeframes you can star as favourites, market open marked, and notes you pin at a price. Pinch and drag to move around it.

Alerts that reach you

Above, below, crossings, percentage moves. They flash the tile, sound through the panel's speakers, and show through the screensaver — so they land while you are looking elsewhere.

Yours to look at

Seven themes including an animated matrix and a cyberpunk palette, eight tile layouts, eight motions, tile edges from a plain rule to a phosphor rim that tears sideways every few seconds, bull/bear tinting, fonts and text sizes, and brightness.

Widgets

A store on the device: clocks, notepads, CPU and memory gauges, micro-buttons. Widgets are written to a small Desk Wick format, so what you add is described rather than executed.

It demonstrates itself

Settings → System → Demo runs a hands-free tour: it flicks through the themes naming each, cycles the tile edges, steps the type size, and switches indicators on over a live chart. It drives the real interface rather than playing a recording, saves nothing it touches, and exits on the first tap.

It keeps itself current

The image on this page is a starting point, not the newest build. The device fetches app updates itself — flash it once and it catches up.

From the panel

Settings → System → Check for updates. It shows the installed version, the published version, and when it last looked, then downloads with a progress bar and swaps the new build in. Tick Update automatically and it checks hourly on its own.

It will not reboot on you

An update installs in the background but never restarts by itself — restarting somebody who is watching a position is not a decision software should make. The new build waits for a tap, and the panel reloads into it when you give one, rather than leaving new code installed behind a page still running the old. If a build fails to start, the device rolls back on its own.

Flash it

Takes about five minutes, and there's nothing to fill in. You don't need to unzip the download — Imager reads .img.xz directly.

Write the image with Raspberry Pi Imager.
Choose your Pi model and SD card. Under Operating System, scroll to the bottom, pick Use custom, and select the downloaded deskwick.img.xz. Write it.

Imager's OS customisation step will be greyed out — since Imager 2.0 it only customises images it downloaded itself. Nothing to do: the image sets up its own account.
Boot the Pi with the screen attached.
First boot takes a couple of minutes while it expands the filesystem and configures itself. It reboots once, then comes up in the terminal — no desktop, no cursor, no browser chrome — running on simulated market data.
Give it WiFi.
On the device: Settings → Network. It scans, shows signal strength, and asks for the passphrase on the on-screen keyboard. Nothing to edit, no second computer.

If it has never been on a network at all and you would rather set that up before first boot, put the card back in your computer and run configure-card.sh against the bootfs volume that mounts. It asks for your network, and for a password if you want to SSH in, and writes the two cloud-init files the Pi reads on boot. By hand, that's network-config on the same volume:
```
network:
  version: 2
  wifis:
    renderer: NetworkManager
    wlan0:
      dhcp4: true
      optional: true
      regulatory-domain: "US"
      access-points:
        "Your Network":
          password: "your-passphrase"
```

The account it makes is deskwick, with no password at all — the screen logs itself in, and there's nothing to guess from a public download. That also means no SSH until you set a password or add a key, which is what configure-card.sh is for. It rewrites user-data, so you can give the account a different name there too.

Set it up

Laying out tiles works either on the panel or from a browser. The API key still wants a text editor.

Lay out your tiles

On the device, tap the + on any page to add a tile or a widget, and hold one to move, retarget or delete it. For a keyboard and a bigger canvas, open http://<pi>:8080/editor in a normal browser — changes appear on the panel immediately.

Add live prices

Put a free Finnhub key in /opt/deskwick/backend/.env and restart, and the simulated data is replaced with real quotes.

ssh <user>@<pi>
sudo nano /opt/deskwick/backend/.env     # FINNHUB_API_KEY=...
sudo systemctl restart deskwick

A browser off the device asks for a token the first time — the panel itself is trusted because it runs there, but nothing else is. Read it off the screen under Settings → System → Remote access and paste it in. It is deliberately not fetchable over the network, so standing in front of the panel is the credential; a rotate button beside it cuts off anything still holding an old one.

Driving your computer

Macro buttons send keystrokes to the machine you actually work on. Two ways, and you can use both at once — it's set per button.

Over USB

The Pi presents itself as a real USB keyboard, so there's nothing to install on the other machine. Cable its USB-C port to your computer and power the Pi from the GPIO pins instead — USB-C becomes the data link.

Off by default, since it repurposes the power port. Turn it on once:

sudo /opt/deskwick/deploy/kiosk-setup.sh --usb
sudo reboot

Over the network

Run the small companion agent on the target machine and point the Pi at it. No cables, and it can drive more than one computer.