River System Inventory

[TerryJC]

Today I received most of the remaining electronic modules from China and thought it would be helpful to create an inventory of everything we had.

The attached spreadsheet includes all of the electronic modules held by me and installed at the WMT, plus sundry other items that will ultimately be needed as the system is constructed. One thing that the exercise has revealed is that we will eventually have to buy some more Raspberry Pi Heat Sink Kits, but we should be OK for a while yet. (We'll need more when we implement the Matrix Pump Assembly).

Penri,

I've included a list of items that you have in your possession, so could you check the second page and correct / add to it as necessary? You may want to add the mechanical components too (such as the Gate Valve Assys) and possibly the sundry IP65 cases etc.

[TerryJC]

While considering the design of the Gate Valve, I realised that I had not included Micro USB to Type A Ethernet Adaptors in the list of items required for this system. Twenty of these have now been ordered from Gearbest at 32p each. I have one or two here, but they are of the bulky variety, so I've procured a different, smaller, type.

See the updated Inventory attached.

[Penri]

I've made an initial input into the inventory, see attached.

It would be nice to have this linked to parts lists for each sub-assembly, in a database preferably.

Do you know of any free (open source) on-line databases (simple for me) we could use collaboratively. I looked at the one in OpenOffice n but I couldn't get they thing to work, even in Noddy mode!

BTW please say it I've got the wrong end of the stick on this.


Penri

[TerryJC]

Penri,

Looks good to me. I must admit, I hadn't thought of including discrete components! I have a few bits and pieces here; some of which are my own private stock which I donate as needed and some which were bought for the WMT and then abandoned (eg, the MOSFETs). They are all available should a need arise.

Re the database; you've been spoilt by having a CMS to play with. Actually, I think that it's a good idea for two main reasons. First we will find it increasingly difficult to keep track of parts as the project progresses and secondly, I'm still keen to use a database to store and retrieve the Readings and Events from the running system, so any work in this field can only help.

Having said that, I can't say I'm expert in the development of databases and I certainly don't know of any GUI based tools that we could use. I'm assuming that we would probably want to host this database (for the Inventory) on a website somewhere and access it from virtually any platform. To that end I've posted a query on the Linux User Group Mailing List and await the responses with bated breath.

[TerryJC]

I've had some responses from the Dorset LUG and have independently discovered that my hosting provider (One and One) provides up to 100,000 instances of MySQL databases as part of the package. That should be enough

I relayed this to the list and it was suggested that One and One might also provide access to PHPMyAdmin. It does; so I am looking into how
suitable that is for our purpose, so I have expanded the question to include how the Users might access the database as well as the developers.

Watch this space.

[Penri]

I've never knowingly uses SQL to construct a database but know that there's a lot of it about, so I feel a learning experience coming on.

[TerryJC]

It turns out that PHPMyAdmin is exactly what the name implies; a tool to help administer a MySQL database. It would normally be used to structure a database, create the links and to develop Reports, amongst other things.

To use the database in the way that we used the CMS we would then have to create a User Interface; probably in the form of a web page with buttons to press and fields to fill in when we wanted to add an item. It has been suggested on the LUG List that such a web page would be best constructed using Flask or Django and Google searches suggest PHP as the approach.

In short, this would be a variation of the approach that we have been considering for the Staff GUI; a web page with a connection to a database that contains all the current and historical readings, with a certain amount of control provided for staff members. In this case, each Assembly would have a Report that listed the components needed, including quantities and values where necessary.

It's all doable and I'll have a go at creating the database on my hosting provider's server after the current workload on the Gate Valve is complete (or at least awaiting a dependency). It's quite a steep learning curve, so I'm currently trying to identify a free (or cheap) tutorial / reference guide. The books on the subject tend to be aimed at professional DBAs and so attract the kind of prices that such textbooks usually do.

If you learn anything in parallel then let me know.

[TerryJC]

These have just been suggested by someone on the LUG Mailing List:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odoo or
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tryton.

Something to look into later perhaps.

[TerryJC]

We're still on a spreadsheet. I've attached the latest, which shows the current shortages.

(Note that these shortages include the need for spares, so currently we have enough kit to build the system, but not necessarily enough to maintain it without sourcing replacements (which may not be available by then).

[TerryJC]

After my telephone discussion with Penri today I've been able to update this document (see attached). We are mostly in a good shape, although Raspberry Pi Zeros continue to be an issue, partly because I had a spate of damaging them some time ago, partly because we've pinched one or two for other projects (Railway Room, Minster Bells, etc) and partly because I thought that we had more completed Gate Valves in the WMT Workshop than we did.

The main problem with Pi Zeros is that they are only available in quantityies of 1 per customer, so the £4.80 price becomes £7.80 or so when you reach the Checkout. Secondly, the stock levels are generally low and The Pi Hut is currently out of stock. I have ordered one Pi from Pimoroni and registered with The Pi Hut to be notified when the Zero comes into stock.

The Inventory shows that we will ultimately need four more Pi Zeros for this project but two of them are for spares, so two will be enough for the time being.

Penri,

After our phone conversation I realised that this inventory had always been specific to the River System, so I have posted it here.