Raspberry Pi

[sandr]

Hi Anders.

I have a few suggestions for your excellent program.
Please add a pollinginterval setting to the pellmon.conf file, and use this value as timing for the polling, and use the value in the generation of the rrd-db.
Why?

Because I think it will cause serious trouble in a very short time with a pollinginterval of 10 secs.
Eg. 10 values stored every 10 secs, will cause 86400 writes to the SD-card a day. I know, that the card and OS have a kind of wear-levelling, but not for the Inode-table !! I have a collequa that weared his SD-card down in a very short time this way !!

The best will be, that your excellent program made a copy of the rrd-db to a RAM-filesystem on the start, and thereafter copied the working db to the "Backup" db-file every eg. 2 hour. Then you will have a limited writes to the SD-card.

Another nice feature would be, to have an extra column in your "pollvalues" specification in the conf-file containing the different datatypes that can be used in the rrd-db.
It would be nice to be able to store the feeder_time in the db, so a value for how much pellets have been burned pr kw output can be calculated and shown on the graphs.
And the feeder_time needs to be stored as an counter in the rrd-db.

BR
Steen

[peterfarsinsen]

Anders, what do you think about using twitter bootstrap for the "website"? Would you accept a pull request if I did a responsive layout? I'm not really into maintaining my own fork, and I do respect if you want to test your front end skills on this project

[motoz]

Steen: As you surely noticed I have not added nearly all parameters, some seems quite useless (skraber position???) and some are just missing until someone adds them... I'll add those you did when I get some time over for pellmon next time, thanks. Good suggestions for the backend, I'll keep them in mind. At least the Poll interval setting is trivial to add so I'll do that next (when there is time over..) Might be a good idea to move the protocol mappings to a separate file as well.
Another thing I'll been meaning to add that you might like is command line arguments for the pellmoncli program so you easily can use that to communicate with the server without using dbus directly, if you would like to make your own frontend. And logging of setting changes, alarms and so on, much to do...
Peter: Wow, thats even better than I hoped for. I will absolutely pull that!!

[peterfarsinsen]

https://github.com/peterfarsinsen/PellM ... /bootstrap

[motoz]

Pulled in Peter's changes to master right away. Very much an improvement, thank you! Btw, learning to use git properly is also a goal with this project, so don't hesitate to correct me if I make a mess of the repo somehow.

[peterfarsinsen]

Ohh. That wasn't really what I was planning for. I just posted the link in case anybody wanted to have a look

The indentation is all messed up as I did the markup/testing on my Pi where Vim isn't really set up, and I rewrote some of the javascript, so there might be some bugs. Anyhow, I'll pull your changes from master and continue the development in a new branch.

[motoz]

Yeah, I figured that, but it was anyway so much better looking than my version and I didn't notice any bugs so I thought it would be a shame to not pull it in right away. I don't think we have much of a userbase (guess that's all of you, me and Steen) that would be affected by a premature "release", but I'll be nice and wait for a pull request next time...

[motoz]

Hi Steen,
I added some of your suggestions, a pollinterval setting and a possibility to specify the rrd datatype in the config file, but I'm not sure if a counter is enugh to get a sensible graph when the poll interval is faster than the counter changes. Let me know if you work something out. Also added the flow and return temp data points. Regarding the memory card burn out, maybe the best solution would be to use the rrdcached daemon, it seems to be made for exatly that scenario, what do you think?

[sandr]

Hi Anders.

Excellent.
The polling interval is very usefull, and the way the RRD-config-exception is made is excellent.
It's not very usefull to print the pellet-counter on the graph, but the value is needed to calculate how many pellets have been burned pr kw heat. And it should be possible to grapph Kw produced during an hour / Pellets burned pr hour

I added this value to you config to be able to calculate eg. pellets burned pr hour:
'feeder_capacity': { ('0000','zzzz') : data (FrameZ00, 12, 0) },

Regarding the writing to the rrd-database, and have mooved the rrd-database to a ramdisk. On powerup I use a rc-file that copies the database to the ramdisk, and on powerdown I use the same rc-file to save the db back to my homedir. And on regular intervals I saves the db-file from the ramdisk back to my homedir.
Also the graph.png have been moved to the ramdisk, and a symbolic link is pointing to the new location from the homedir :-)

BR
Steen

[peterfarsinsen]

Hi

Steen, could you share your scripts? Maybe even on GitHub. I already wore down one SD card (not due to PellMon) because of intensive disk writing.

Anders, I've started using a layout (layout.html), in order to share markup between pages. My plan is to move scripts and css out in seperate files too, but as I'm new to MAKO I need to figure out how to add script/style tags to the layout from the rendering view etc. It's a work in progress

Could you add a view for the login form? I had a look a auth.py, but even if it seems fairly straight forward, I did not want to add view rendering to that class as it seems wrong (the html probably shouldn't be the too).

I tried passing the username from session down to layout.html in order to be able to check if a user should se the login or logout link in the menu. While it does work, I think it's ugly. Could you maybe take a look? It should be passed down on all pages.