fixed_sensor_visualization

A (web-based) visualization for fixed sensor (radiation) data.

See full example at http://gamma.tar.bz/nGeigies/

A slightly modified version of this code is making the graphs on http://realtime.safecast.org/

Description

A collection of scripts and settings to visualize data from fixed sensors. Initial scope is limited to Safecast nGegie sensors - fixed radiation sensors.

Prerequisites

The following is my development environment, so it is (kind of) guaranteed to work in it.

• A recent Linux distro (I use Gentoo)
• GNU make {>=4.1}
• GNUplot {>=5.0.3}
• Perl {>=5.20.2}
  • DateTime::ISO8601 {>=0.80.0}
• pngcrush {>=1.7.81}
• imagemagick {>=6.9.0.3}

I don’t plan to release an ebuild (package) anytime soon, so to get all the deps on Gentoo, try

sudo emerge -avtuq sys-devel/make sci-visualization/gnuplot dev-lang/perl dev-perl/DateTime-Format-ISO8601 media-gfx/pngcrush media-gfx/imagemagick

Usage

Make sure you have EDITOR envvar defined (or simply edit Makefile.config with your favorite text editor)

cp -a Makefile.config{.EXAMPLE,} && ${EDITOR} Makefile.config
make view
make publish

Architecture

• Local configuration (API endpoint, sensor IDs to plot, graphs color&size, etc.) is stored in Makefile.config, edit to suit your needs.

• Four sub-directories are used/created:

  • in: some static input data like the main database (a CSV file), HTML templates, etc., updated from the repo when you do git pull
  • cache: dynamic data (each sensor readings, metadata, etc.), downloaded/refreshed and further processed (via make -> cacher.pl invocation)
  • tmp: temporary data (averaged readings, plot titles, etc.), produced via make -> gnuplot -> timeplot_all.gpl
  • out: final local mirror of what gets published to the server

• The usual make publish workflow is as follows (see inside Makefile for other targets/details):

  • invoke cacher.pl to fetch data from https://api.safecast.org/ and produce smoothed data in cache
  • invoke gnuplot to execute timeplot.gpl and produce each individual sensor graphs (e.g. out/40.png and out/40_small.png) as well as data for all-sensor-graphs (inside tmp)
  • invoke gnuplot to execute timeplot_all and produce all-sensor-graphs (out/LIVE.png and out/TEST.png)
  • parse HTML templates to produce the final output out/index.html and out/TEST.html
  • publish the results on a server (see PUBLISH_CMD inside Makefile.conf)