“This instructables show how to build an Thin Client with a WiFi capable Arduino dev board, e.g. ESP32 or Raspberry Pi Pico W.
Supplies
Any network capable Arduino dev device, with touchscreen display is preferred.
What Is Thin Client?
Thin Client is an minimalistic hardware that provide a user interface connect the user to the actual processing machine. E.g. using a low cost laptop remote (VNC/RDP) to a Windows server, the laptop is a Thin Client.
Thin Client not require a high processing power device since all jobs are running on the server, so it is called Thin Client.
Thin Client is not a new thing, in last century, the relation of terminal and mainframe is a good example. Terminal is a Thin Client.
Thin Client has many advantage if it can be made from low cost hardware. But how low it can be?
Sun Microsystems Sun Ray is a good example of GUI Thin Client in last century, it even has tailor-made low cost low power CPU but the unit cost still very high.
Then Intel introduce a low cost CPU, ATOM, many vendors (e.g. HP, Dell, etc) use ATOM provide Thin Client solution. However, it still need connect to a monitor, keyboard and mouse. After counted the cost of these components, the total cost is not much lower than a standard desktop computer.
How about using an WiFi capable Arduino dev board with touchscreen to build a Thin Client? This low cost should be much reasonable to call it as a Thin Client.”