Web-based Realtime Xbee Monitor/Control System

Intro

Very light weight web based realtime xbee monitor/control system. You can deploy it on your Raspberry PI if you like.

Background

This project is originally designed for SUNIST Tokamak Wireless(ie. ZigBee) monitoring and control system. The system was originally programmed on Windows system using VB language which is hardly to maintain when more ZigBee modules added and of course not portable on other platforms.

This system uses xbee wireless module to monitor the status of power supply, vacuum chamber and other equipments as well as the control of them build up the slow one (in seconds). Below is a picture of xbee modules deployed around SUNIST Tokamak.

Framework

• Server side: Flask redis
• Front-end: Bootstrap jQuery

Installation

Install redis, python-pip, python-virtualenv with your linux distribution package manager (apt-get, yum, zypper, pacman etc.)

virtualenv --distribute ~/venv
cd ~/venv
source bin/activate
pip install pyserial XBee redis Flask
git clone https://github.com/dengshuan/sunist.git

Deployment and Usage

1. Modify your xbee configuration file: scripts/config.json
2. Initialize your xbees. start redis server if not started yet

   cd ~/venv/sunist/scripts
   python initialize.py
       

3. Begin sampling

   python sample.py
       

4. Launch web server, run following commands in a new terminal

   cd ~/venv/sunist
   source ~/venv/bin/activate
   python sunist.py
       

5. Open http://localhost:5000 in your web browser. If you want to view this page on other computer or mobile client, change last line in sunist.py to app.run(host = '0.0.0.0') , and visit http://YourServerIP:5000
6. Watch sampling data and change pin output level all in a web browser
7. Deploy with nginx and uwsgi. Make sure nginx, uwsgi, uwsgi-plugin-python installed on the server. Then create nginx configuration file /etc/nginx/sites-avaliable/sunist

   server {
           listen 5000;
           server_name hostname;
       
           location /static {
                   alias /home/pi/venv/sunist/static;
           }
       
           location / {
                   include uwsgi_params;
                   uwsgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9001;
                   uwsgi_param UWSGI_PYHOME /home/pi/venv;
                   uwsgi_param UWSGI_CHDIR /home/pi/venv/sunist;
                   uwsgi_param UWSGI_MODULE sunist;
                   uwsgi_param UWSGI_CALLABLE app;
           }
       
           error_page 404 /404.html;
   }
       

   And create uwsgi configuration file: /etc/uwsgi/apps-available/myuwsgi.ini

   [uwsgi]
   plugins=python
   vhost=true
   socket=127.0.0.1:9001
       

   Link above two files to enabled sites or apps and restart service

   sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/sunist /etc/nginx/sites-enabled
   sudo ln -s /etc/uwsgi/apps-available/myuwsgi.ini /etc/uwsgi/apps-enabled
   sudo service nginx restart
   sudo service uwsgi restart
       

   That’s it! (Note that above deployment is based on raspberry pi with raspbian Wheezy. Other platform should be similar, but not tested yet)

Tips

• Different linux distributions may assign different device name for usb port, usually /dev/ttyUSBn or /dev/ttySn where n is a number. Make sure your distro assign /dev/ttyUSBn , if not, change /dev/ttyUSBn to /dev/ttySn in scripts/initialize.py and scripts/sample.py
• You would see Permission denied error if you are not in the dialout group. Add yourself to dialout group by sudo usermod -a -G dialout $USER

Todo

• Improve UI (heavily depend on user’s usage)
• Add web interface for configuration
• Add a detail documentation for secondary development