Garduino - Project Interface (Windows 2008 Server)

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uflnuceng
 
Posts: 25
Joined: Wed Nov 20, 2013 12:03 pm

Garduino - Project Interface (Windows 2008 Server)

Post by uflnuceng »

Hey everyone...

Plugging along on my Garduino project (I even called PA One Call to make sure I'm not going over any public utility lines!) and now I'm trying to figure out how I want to communicate with it.

Now I have a small business that I run out of my house and realized I have a pretty diesel Windows 2008 Server that I'm hardly using 1/10th of its ability, so this afternoon I got an intranet website (running IIS7) up and running with PHP and its working perfectly.
Server layout
Server layout
Server Layout.jpg (29.07 KiB) Viewed 325 times
Obviously I can control my Arduino through a web interface, there are plenty of opensource examples and writeups, but I'm thinking baby steps first. I would like to be able to simply view the data my arduino collects on dynamically created web pages. Now, what is your opinion with the data coming off the arduino? Should I:
  1. Store all the sensor data on the Arduino Ethernet Shield SD Card, and have my server grab it, or
  2. Have the Arduino send all the data via ClientPrint and have the server hold the data, or
  3. Something else that I haven't thought of?
One of the reasons I like viewing the data on my server is because I discovered that Google Visualization has some pretty decent tools for creating dynamic graphs, which will be nice to view along side future controls. This beats having to import text files into MS Excel and creating charts from scratch every time.

The nice thing about ClientPrint is that it keeps all the data on the server, but is there a chance I could lose data in transmission? I'm thinking writing to the SD Card will be fast, and having an offsite backup of data is a good thing, but then I'm writing more code to control the SD card instead of just including a library and sending the data down the RJ45.

Again, thanks for your continued help. It adds an extra bit of fun to the project knowing that I can bounce ideas off like minded crackpots :D

P.S. - I have read your lesson about using Windows, Python and Pyserial.

bnbfamilyfarm
 
Posts: 4
Joined: Sat Mar 08, 2014 3:41 pm

Re: Garduino - Project Interface (Windows 2008 Server)

Post by bnbfamilyfarm »

Looks like we're both working on similar tasks. I'm a solid month or so away from getting to where you are, but I figured I could share my plan, perhaps we can brainstorm. IF nothing else, here's some food for thought.

I built a control system for a DJ5L I sold a few months ago. I used an arduino mega, either net shield, 4 siansmart relays, a wifi router and a few power supplies. http://www.bnbfamilyfarm.com/about/blake/

I used Flash Professional to build the interface and used Mixpanel.com to collect data on how I used the system. The wifi router was used to "extend" my verizon jetpack which gave me a connection to the internet. All the logic was handled in the Flash app, I simply used the Mega as an IO controller. Mixpanel.com has several Apis to use their tools: I used the AS3 API https://mixpanel.com/help/reference/as3 because I was developing in flash.

For my garden project, I don't want to rely on an internet connection and I want to create more dynamic data collection. I plan on using an Raspberry PI with PHP and MySQL.

Raspberry PI Setting Up Apache
http://www.instructables.com/id/Raspber ... -with-PHP/
Raspberry PI Setting Up MySQL
http://raspberrywebserver.com/sql-datab ... ry-pi.html

Here's a nice write up on using an Arduino with a Raspberry connected through USB:
http://www.benk.ca/node/10

I imagine each controller sending variables to MySQL as functions are processed. I could then use those variables to display custom charts, as well as use the data to manage control functions.

For the moment, I'm in the middle of a learning curve: http://forums.adafruit.com/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=50858

Once this gets worked out, data is the next priority.

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