Computer Science Canada

Local Hosted Web Page GUI? (RPi Dash Project)

Author:  ecookman [ Fri Jan 18, 2019 5:21 pm ]
Post subject:  Local Hosted Web Page GUI? (RPi Dash Project)

Figured I'd take on an ambitious project in the off season and instead of buying a new dash and data logger for my race bike, I've started to make one. Why? Because I don't want to drop another 1500 bucks when I've got other poor financial decisions to make on an endurance bike (lol)... and really missing screwing around with this kind of stuff. I've got the hardware bit sorted, but am struggling on the software end in the second iteration now.

The project started out with an Arduino driven GPS/LCD to make a basic lap timer, to now a full blown dash. I'm currently working on moving the mostly finished code to the RPi in Python3 and have implemented some data logging. However now that I am looking to make a dash out of a 7" TFT panel (instead of a small LCD screen that prints times), I am wondering if moving the project over to Java(?) would make my life easier as I would like to have some sort of local web implementation for a GUI and logged data access. I am wanting to implement this because then I can download/save/view times and splits on a laptop or some sort of tablet/smart phone...without having to plug anything into the "box". Water ingress at 200km/h+ is a problem, so keeping everything water tight is super important and significantly easier with a totally sealed unit.

That being said... This is where my ambition and knowledge level have a significant overlap. The Arduino based lap timer, is about my limit and I'm stuck at how to develop the rest. I have 0 experience with trying to do anything with web hosting/connectivity nor can I seem to find some basic tutorials that I can get started and work off of (probably due to not having the correct search strings in Google because I don't even know what to call that kind of functionality!) It has been a few (6+?) years since I've tried to tackle any serious coding and a lot has changed...

Any sort of direction or input would be greatly appreciated.



Cheers

Author:  Insectoid [ Fri Jan 18, 2019 6:45 pm ]
Post subject:  RE:Local Hosted Web Page GUI? (RPi Dash Project)

You can log into the pi and save the log files directly. Or even just store the logs in a public folder you can access on your phone.

Otherwise look into telemetry software. Odds are all this is available as open source software and you won't have to do any coding.

Author:  ecookman [ Fri Jan 18, 2019 7:02 pm ]
Post subject:  RE:Local Hosted Web Page GUI? (RPi Dash Project)

Fair point for the remote log in. I've already got SSH set up. Doesn't that require something in the middle? I was more thinking of having the pi as the access point

I've looked across most of the open source telemetry software available. However saldy I'm trying to set this up on a vintage bike, so it doesn't have any trick electronics that I can interface to drive the software. The stuff that is available is all tied to some sort of other hardware and their own libraries to support that specific hardware. I don't think that that will be useful to dissect.

Author:  Insectoid [ Fri Jan 18, 2019 8:44 pm ]
Post subject:  RE:Local Hosted Web Page GUI? (RPi Dash Project)

If you really want to go the web page route, it's trivial to set up a web server that displays an HTML file. Then it's fairly straightforward if tedious to write a script that writes an HTML file containing your logged data. Once the data is on your local machine you can use whatever program you want to visualize it.


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