This project allows us to observe the status of the floor heating in our house,
both in the present and the past.
The valves of the floor heating system in our house are managed by a homemade system, based on an arduino. This system is not very transparent, however, and that's where this app comes in. This website/app allows us at home to get better insight into the status of our home heating to anyone connected to our WiFi network.
This project can be split up in two parts:
- The listener
- The webinterface
This split architecture allows you to, for example, update the website without having to stop the data collection of the listener.
The first step, after cloning the repo, is to create a conda enviroment with the following modules:
conda install pyserial flask flask-session sqlalchemy psycopg2 numpy drawsvg
After activating this enviroment, also install tmux and postgresql via the
installer of your linux distro (only Linux is officially supported, other OS's
likely require hacks).
When first setting up postgresql, you will first need to add a password to your postgres user and add your current user to postgres. Use the following links to install and add the account:
- https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/postgresql-psql-commands/
- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/tutorials/wsl-database#install-postgresql
- https://phoenixnap.com/kb/postgres-create-user
After this, open psql as the postgres user and create a database called heating
via:
CREATE DATABASE heating;
Connect to heating with either the psotgres- or the local useraccount:
\c heating
then create the direct_history table with the commands provided in
make_direct_history.sql. The database should be ready after this. Close the
psql terminal with \q.
For this project, two programs have to be able to run independantly of one another.
Also, when setting up the programs via SSL, the program you started via your
standard terminal would just stop running when closing the connection. Therefore,
I used tmux to be able to run multiple programs side-by-side. When installed, use
tmux new -s listener
to create a new session called listener. In this session, activate the correct conda enviroment and run the
python listener.py
to start the listener. You
should be prompted for the database password for your user. If set up correctly,
the program should now start collecting and storing data, and print recieved data
to the console. Detach from the tmux screen by quickly pressing Ctrl+b and then
d. To get back to the listener session, use
tmux attach -t listener
Here are more links to help with using tmux:
- https://www.howtogeek.com/671422/how-to-use-tmux-on-linux-and-why-its-better-than-screen/
- https://superuser.com/questions/209437/how-do-i-scroll-in-
To get the website up, start a new tmux session named flask with
tmux new -s flask
Activate the conda enviroment, check whether you are in the right file, and run
flask run --host=0.0.0.0
to expose the website to your entire local network. You will also be reprompted to
give your database password. The website should now be available on *local ip address*:5000 (flask should show this address when started). Now detach from the
tmux session.
Everything should now be running. If you are running these programs on a laptop, you might want to be able to turn of it's screen. Try one of the methods in this discussion for this: https://askubuntu.com/questions/62858/turn-off-monitor-using-command-line
Thanks to my dad for providing and walking me through the arduino source code and helping me with the home networking. Additional thanks go out to the assistants of the programmeren minor and the creators of the modules used for this project. This project uses PySerial to communicate with the arduino: https://pyserial.readthedocs.io/en/latest/examples.html