Resurrection of the Mobile Staff / Volunteer GUI

[TerryJC]

I have started this Topic because I have (finally) started work on the Engineering GUI that Penri requested last year. Owing to various factors it didn't get completed.

A week or two ago; when I was attending the site to open valves so that Penri could control water flow manually, he reminded me about this and I produced a Requirements Specification for it, based on Hamish's Visitor GUI Requirements. The agreed version may be found at https://gitlab.com/wmtprojectsteam/rive ... _Web_Based Control_System_Requirements_Iss_0.3.odt.

Since then I have been liaising with Hamish by email and believe that I know how to do the development using Flask and leveraging the existing Software Framework. We both think that the Stage Butts Pi would be a good candidate to host the GUI software.

I don't believe that the actual coding will be too challenging, but I am currently unsure how to test the code before deployment. I have spent some time trying to utilise the VMs produced by Hamish and Patrick, but have found that the running code is quite unresponsive, especially when I try to run the NAS VM together with a test copy of the Stage Butts VM and a Gate Valve VM (let alone all of the River System Pis which I really need to do a proper test).

I have a reasonable test setup here in my Workroom, but cannot access the on-site NAS over VPN from a Raspberry Pi and only have one each of representative SACs and Gate Vlaves. Alternatively, I can access the on-site NAS over VPN from my PC, but that is not a Pi and I'm not convinced that code developed on a Linux PC would be very representative. This method could access the test setup, but there would still be a shortfall in the number of available Pis to control.

In the end I should be able to do some of the initial work on my PC and then some more on the test setup, but in the end, I'm going to need to finish debugging on site as part of integration.

I'm away in the Midlands for a few days and will revisit this on my return.

[TerryJC]

I've thought about this some more and realised that I could access the site with a Pi running the Stage Butts software from my workshop over VPN by installing the Client software the Pi. However, the test setup wouldn't be very representative, because the site network wouldn't see the Stage Butts as the host anyway because the VPN would give it a different IP address.

It would seem therefore that the best that I can do if I am to avoid additional expense or disruption to the system is to develop the GUI web app on my PC and simply ensure that it can access the database and retrieve the necessary data.

The disruptive method would be for me to remove the NAS Box from the network and bring it home. The expensive method would be for me to obtain a suitable Pi and create a second WMT database running in my test network here. I would have to populate it with a copy of the site content and I doubt if the process would be easy (bearing in mind how long it took Hamish to get things right).

I'll try the simple and cheap method first and then decide how to integrate the GUI later.

[hamishmb]

Hi there,

May I suggest the new GUI not be called the Engineering GUI, as we already have a monitoring GUI running on the NAS box called the Engineer GUI? I think the naming is likely to cause some confusion. Code for this GUI is at https://gitlab.com/wmtprojectsteam/engineer-gui/

[TerryJC]

Hamish,

Are you saying that the GUI is actually running? I didn't think that it had got that far.

If it is, how is it accessed,?

[hamishmb]

Terry,

IIRC, it's available under /engineer-gui on the NAS box's webserver. I can't check right now as the VPN isn't working on my end. The Engineer GUI has been up and running for years, are you confusing this with the Mobile Visitor GUI, which never got beyond an early prototype?

[TerryJC]

Probably yes.

[TerryJC]

Following on from Hamish's point about the naming of this tool, I've had a look at the GUI at http://192.168.0.25/engineer-gui, and yes it is still there. I only have a vague recollection of Hamish doing this and had thought that it was never completed.

This Topic began to discuss the resurrection of the GUI that Penri requested last year and not the one that Hamish did, but I take the point that there is too much similarity between engineer-gui and engineering GUI, so I have renamed it 'Mobile Staff / Volunteer GUI'.

I've renamed all the Post Titles.