Monthly Archives: March 2021

Kootnet Sensors Interface Progress

I now have all the pages working on the new interface except for Graphing and Remote Management.

The next step, after finishing Graphing, Remote Management and the notification system, will be to look over the interface as a whole and tweak things to be more consistent and adjust a few minor things, like the size of text and number fields.

I’m also thinking I’ll remove the old interface altogether, as it’s adding a decent amount of bulk to the overall program.

I have not had as much time as I would have liked to work on it, but progress is continuing! Very little back-end work has been done since the last stable release, so it’s safe to upgrade to dev and check out the interface progress.

Kootnet Sensors Web Interface

Since Kootnet Sensors has a decent amount of functionality, I thought it was time to re-visit the web interface itself. When I first made it, I really didn’t know much about site design and it shows, both visually and in the code. So now I’m remaking it for a more modern look.

After looking around for a template to use, I decided on AT Pro Admin, which is an MIT licensed template that uses pure HTML, CSS and JS. It’s small in size, quick to load and has a sweet dark/light theme toggle. It also comes with and uses Font Awesome, which I have not heard of before but I am super glad I have now! It’s loaded with very professional icons for pretty much everything. I’m going to buy the pro version to support them, even if I’m not actually going to use any pro icons.

I have already customized the template layout and added a few pages. It’s looking pretty sweet so far. I have also found a way to only load the main page once, then when clicking links, it only loads those specific pages inside the main interface. I can already notice the load time differences compared with my old interface. I’m trying to limit the required webpage plugins to keep download size low and speed high.

I’m actually not sure how long it will take to do the web interface overhaul (month?) but I have a link to both the old and new interface on the index page, so if you upgrade to the dev version, you can check it out without worrying about losing access to settings and pages. So far the layout is pretty much done the main dashboard page work along with live sensor readings and notes. I still have to customize the notes section a bit too.

So feel free to check out the latest dev version to get a sneak preview. Once I have the interface mostly done, I’ll probably replace the “Quick Graph” section with “Live Graphs” to constantly update graphs based on local or remote sensor readings. I have been having trouble getting the graph to actually graph updates, but I have already figured out how to get javascript to add new readings.

I’ll try and update the blog when I’m getting closer to completing the new interface.