Chalmers Robotics Dashboard for Live Data

Goal

The goal for this project is to provide a platform for Chalmers Robotics to publish live data to be viewed by the outside world.

How it works

The core functionality of the project is based on a PHP backend that responds to HTTP requests for publishing data and images. Images are stored on disk, while data is stored in a mysql database.

The frontend then uses JavaScript and AJAX requests to fetch the data from the API and update the HTML contents automatically.

Requirements [WIP]

A webserver running PHP and MySQL database.

Installation [WIP]

1. Clone this repository using

   git clone https://github.com/ChalmersRobotics/crf-dashboard.git
   cd crf-dashboard
   

2. Upload /www to webserver
3. Create the database table, se here.
4. Rename or copy config.example.php to config.php and edit the settings
   • Change both the key_secret and salt to new uniqe random strings
   • Fill out the database connection settings
5. Test it out!
6. Edit the dashboard to your preferences (the one in this repository is highly customized for usage by Chalmers Robotics!)

API Details

See Image API Specification and Data API Specification for more details on the specific APIs.

Usage and Client Library

The repository includes a simple python based client library and examples for publishing both images and data[WIP]. The code uses the excelent Requests library for HTTP communication.

For the Image API, an image can be easily uploaded using the following curl command (replace <> with your own values):

curl -F 'image=@<IMAGE PATH>' -H 'Token: <TOKEN>' <BASE_URL>/api/image/<RESOURCE_NAME>

Or if you prefer to do a raw file upload instead:

curl --data-binary @<IMAGE PATH> -H 'Content-Type: text/plain' -H 'Token: <TOKEN>' <BASE_URL>/api/image/<RESOURCE_NAME>

The Content-Type: text/plain header need to be specified because the --data flag automatically sets the Content-Type to application/x-www-form-urlencoded which is not what the API expects.

Token Generator

A publicly available token generator is included in the /token-gen directory. It is based on JavaScript using the js-sha256 library. All calculations are done in the browser, eliminating the need for sending senitive secret keys over the internet. It can be used to generate tokens for both the Image and Data API.