Hi, Im London based interactive design artis, i got MA in New media studio in Academy of Fine Art in Prague. I have experience with all kind of sensors, arduino and raspberry pi boards. Ussualy im using linux based system for running my art installation, that means it must be really well working without maintenance.
My recent project is dual synchro video on 2 raspberry board thru GPIO pins. I modified raspberry pi distribution to be read only, so its really durable even on hard power off and its not corrupting sd card. Now im using this distro for other project, ussualy for low budget projects.
All my project are plug and play, so usually just plug in to the electricity and it will boot to system and start programs.
about your project:
I can start chromium with startup address, can be done by reading address from first FAT partition which is accesible from normal PC (or this must be done remotely?)
I can dynamically change boot screen using init script to generate image file based on MAC address
power loss is solve by read only system, with for example storage on USB flash
power off can be done by script or also it is safe to unplug electricity directly with read only system
Let me know if you will have more questions on me