abhn / rpi-status-monitor Goto Github PK

A simple framework to enable easy logging of custom parameters (network activity, system status) along with other data (time, weather, news) from a Raspberry Pi to a display in a non-intrusive fashion.

Didn't make sense? Read on.

This project was inspired by the Magic Mirror project (Github, Youtube), which projects a display from behind a mirror. The screen is connected to your Pi to display news, weather and time. The idea is brilliant, and I wanted to extend it to display a few of my custom params

• White monospace text on black background looks good, especially at night
• Displays:
  • Time in 24 hour format
  • Randomly chosen quote from /static/quotes.txt
  • Current temperature and city name
  • Date, day, month, year
  • Network activity in kBps (upload and download speeds in realtime)
  • CPU and RAM usage percentage
• Updates in real time, ideal for use as a logger/monitor or simply a nerd photo frame
• Uses CSS3 Grids for easy addition/deletion/rearrangement of monitoring widgets
• Uses vanilla JS on the frontend, Flask backend. Lightweight, even for RPi.

My personal usecase was something along the lines of a digial clock that also displays some nerd stats like network activity and CPU/RAM usage.

I recently turned my Pi into a wireless router (See this https://frillip.com/using-your-raspberry-pi-3-as-a-wifi-access-point-with-hostapd/) and wanted a way to see various stats on the screen such as the total network throughput, clients connected and some basic stats here and there.

This status monitor is like a cherry on top of the in-progress pi-router project, and looks cool.

Other usecases I could think of

• Display latest rss feeds from your favourite blogs
• Subreddit top 5 posts for the day / trending posts on frontpage
• TCP connections established, something like $ netstat -an | grep ESTABLISHED

Interesting additions possible

• Addition of speedometer like dials for things like network activity (see https://bernii.github.io/gauge.js/)
• Google calender / webdav integration for displaying upcoming appointments
• Template code for easy addition of rss feeds, output polled via watch command for any custom bash command

• Raspberry Pi
• Wireless dongle (with AP capabilities) if Pi doesn't have onboard wireless
• Spare LCD display, IPS preferred
• Free time

• Follow this guide to setup wireless access point on your Raspberry Pi.
• I changed the name and password of Pi's hotspot to match my router and turned off router's wireless so that all devices switch automatically.

• Clone this repository $ git clone https://github.com/abhn/RPi-Status-Monitor.git
• cd into project directory $ cd RPi-Status-Monitor
• Create python 3 virtual environment $ virtualenv env
• Activate env $ source env/bin/activate
• Pip install requirements $ pip install -r requirements.txt
• Open app.py with any text editor and edit the following constants
  • LAT and LON should correspond to your location for weather updates
  • INTERFACE_NAME should be your network interface, wlan0 in Pi's builtin wifi's case
  • Signup for openweathermap.org and get your API key. Add that key to your bashrc with $ echo 'export OPENWEATHERAPI=<your-api-key> >> ~/.bashrc replacing <your-api-key with your actual API key
• Start development server with $ python app.py
• If you're on Pi, the built-in browser won't work (no support for CSS grid). Instead, download Chromium ($ sudo apt-get install chromium-browser) and turn on experimental features
• Open http://localhost:5000 in your browser and enter fullscreen mode (F11). Done.
• ?? Profit!

• Automate the browser opening, server starting and going into full screen process for re-enabling things after reboot.
• Get connected clients list, sort data consumed during session and show real time bandwidth usage ( iw dev wlan0 station dump)
• Maintain stats about data usage, most visited web/ip addresses in a mysql/postgres database and create a website ranking table
• Set block lists for ip addresses/website urls

• https://frillip.com/ for the guide on hostapd
• https://github.com/HackerShackOfficial for the inspiration

• GPLv3