The python program which will run on Freya is done, tested, and chugging away happily. Yesterday and today I have been working on a dashboard for Tom, of which the very first functional version is now, well, functional.
The dashboard is just a window with a refresh button and two tabs, one of which displays all received raw data and the other all converted data. It is coded in python using Tkinter (which really had me hating GUI programming for a while there, before I either got the hang of it or merely stumbled on things that were correct) and pysftp, a wonderful little module that wraps paramiko and provides more-than-adequate and hands-off sftp functionality. I tweaked handleData.py to set aside data for the dash in a file the dash can easily grab and parse, and the whole program ended up under 200 lines. I’m treating it more as a proof-of-concept and intermediate tool than as finished code — it’s not pretty and hardly commented. Version 2.0 will be cleaner, more debuggable, and more transparent. It will automatically refresh data and will also display error messages.
Tom’s computer is on Windows 7, so rather than having him run it from the command line I turned the python program into a windows .exe file using py2exe. This entailed a bit of dependency-chasing and a lot of learning-how-to-use-windows-command-line, but it now runs nicely from a desktop shortcut, which from my point of view is victory.
Aside from updating the dash, I still need to write documentation for Freya and add new fields. Doug also may have some new responsibilities for the board for me to implement.
–Soren