The PosBox is a little hardware box based on a Raspberry-Pi that will handle all the peripherals’ drivers and setup in a very easy way:
- You connect the PosBox to your local network.
- You plug your USB peripherals ( Receipt Printer – Barcode Scanner ) to the PosBox
- You launch OpenERP’s Point of Sale on any device – iPad, Android Tablet or PC -while connected to your local network.
- There are no step 4, it’s already working
The PosBox will serve as a gateway between the OpenERP web application and the different peripherals.
It saves you money
We have tested a lot of different hardware setup and we did not find a great solution:
- Industrial Point of Sale Hardware is big, noisy, ugly, expensive and plagued with lousy touchscreens.
- laptops are cheap but flimsy and slow to operate.
- iPads and android tablets are nice and affordable but require expensive wireless peripherals.
Because the PosBox separates the peripherals from the touchscreen devices, you can use an iPad or android tablet with affordable usb peripherals. On just a receipt printer and barcode scanner setup, this saves you 30% of the cost, even including the PosBox. This is not a compromise, you truly get better hardware for less.
Your Point of Sale on iPads or Android Tablets
You get all the benefits to operate your shop on a tablet; wireless access allowing your sales accessing the POS from everywhere in the store, no wire visible on the counter, separate the order screen from the hardware (print receipt in the kitchen). More over, tablets are cheap as they are manufactured in huge volumes, and you can even reuse an existing tablet as we support both iPad and Android.
Open Source and Flexible
The PosBox solution relies on OpenERP modules to support extra devices and features. As it’s open source, it’s very easy to add new features or devices. One could easily add support for other materials, secondary displays, payment systems, etc. We plan to write an extensive documentation on how to extend the Posbox for your specific needs.
The Posbox has the following peripherals to interface with external devices; 2 usb ports, hdmi, audio, rca video, sd card, wireless.
OpenERP Integrators & developers will find it easy to add support for custom hardware on the PosBox as the drivers are simply OpenERP python modules running on a minimalist OpenERP setup