Remote control of URL to show in kiosk mode

[Skjeggtroll]

So I'd like to set up a Raspberry Pi kiosk on a screen in the office to display Grafana dashboards, and I'd like the display to react to external events like switching to the relevant dashboard when there is an alarm, or switching to a specific grafana dashboard when a button hooked up to the GPIO pins is pressed.

Setting up a Raspberry Pi to autoboot into a full-screen browser is easy enough, but actually controlling what page is being shown seems oddly difficult. The solutions I've seen appears to all either resort to dedicated browser extensions, restarting the whole browser or emulating keyboard input -- which all seem either error-prone, limiting or hackish.

Ideally, what I'd like is to tell the running Vivaldi process to open a given URL in the currently active / focused tab from the command-line, similarly to how I already can tell it to open a given URL in a new tab with just running vivaldi [url]. Something along the lines of vivaldi --open-in-active-tab [url], perhaps only allowed if the current Vivaldi process is running in kiosk mode.

Less essential, but still useful, would be the ability to switch tabs in the currently running Vivaldi process from the command line, perhaps limited to the first 10 tabs. That would make cycling through various displays in the kiosk a lot smoother.

[luetage]

@Skjeggtroll See https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40258305

[Skjeggtroll]

@luetage Thank you!

Going back to 2012... Ouch.