With the recent changes to modularize the sensors, you don’t NEED to add a sensor on the Raspberry Pi to get started. Choose the Raspberry Pi as your only sensor in the sensor config file, and you can keep track of System up time and CPU Temperature over time.
This will make testing the program as a whole, a LOT easier and a bit cheaper. This could also be handy for tracking the stability of a Raspberry Pi. If you have a Pi that’s rebooting or freezing up, this would help you track down the real culprit, by giving you a timeframe to narrow the search. Combine that with a CPU Temperature reading accompanying the timeframe, and you can see if the unit is having overheating issues! You can also view multiple Pi’s real time stats in a html table for easy comparison.
This gives me another idea for a Option in the program. I could add a entry in the Sensor config file, to allow “Extra System Information Recordings”, which would record things like CPU, RAM and disk usage. By enabling this, you could literally use the Sensor Programs to truly monitor the health and stability of your Raspberry Pi’s. It can even be enhanced to allow other systems fairly easily, like Windows and Mac.
Of course I never designed them to be used for this scenario. I would have to think about security around the socket connections if there’s a good chance the Sensors are on a open network.
On another related topic. While talking with someone about the Sensors, they suggested I add a realtime graphing feature, to be able to constantly monitor things like Humidity for gardeners. I think I’m about ready to take that on. I’m not 100% sure how to pull it off just yet … What I should really do, is get a plotly dash app working on the sensor itself, so then I just have to pull up a URL based on the IP of the sensor. But then you can only do one at a time, and that’s not very effective for bigger operations… I’ll have to think on this one more.
In other news, I’m feeling pretty good with the state of the Control Center App. I have improved a bunch of the error checking and logging, so it’s harder to make the program “mess up”. I should probably work on notifying the user when things go wrong though. The program adds a error log message when things go wrong, but nothing extra; AKA, if a graph fails for example, it would look like it didn’t do anything. Putting up a GUI OK button message with the error would be good, I just need to be careful to only show it once, so it doesn’t pop up a few thousand times for things like a invalid SQL entry, or maybe create a counter, then at the end, it pop’s up a single message if the counter > 0, and list the count in the message, so you know how many errors were encountered. That could be useful… A few things to consider.
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