Over the years I have been involved with several startups where we made our own Kiosk type devices.
Making steal boxes is a big and difficult task for a software or electronics guy.
I have worked on 2 Internet web surfing Kiosks a DVD Video Rental Machines and Vending Machine as well as many brainstorming sessions for different informational and other vending kiosk type machines to provide everything from recipes to music and movies on USB Sticks.
I have come realize that building the software for theses touchscreen kiosk systems is best done on a LAMP Flash based Linux system. LAMP is Linux OS, Apache Web Server, MySQL, PERL/Python/PHP etc scripting.
One real advantage over the other approaches that I have had to suffer though it that there is a large group of web designers/artists which proven skills that can do beautiful and very cool slick flash interfaces.
When I started we were doing the kiosk in another language such as C, TCL, Visual Studio C++, Visual Basic, C#, Java, and some other programming language. They required the programmer that's doing the data base, Hardware I/O and control and other tasks to also develop the art, and User Interface / user interface flow.
Few programmers can do this well, and worse is that coding an Interface in these other languages is painstaking and ridged. It becomes very inflexible and difficult to maintain.
HTML and Flash you immediately gains all of the flexibility and technology that's been developed for the web.
For Industrial Touch Screen see
http://www.elotouch.com/
Well I just got an E-mail from
ACEsuppliers , this is a news letter of products from China.
There is a company out there making generic Kiosks. Add code and deploy, so rolling out a kiosk based product have never been easier.
UPDATE:
http://www.compustation1.com/ Maker of Kiosk Enclosures.
