Tower Dashboard is simply a web service controling multiple devices via USB interface. It's developed for Raspberry Pi specifically.
We chose Flask as backend because it's python, lightweight, simple.
It's frontend is written in HTML with jinja, decorated with bootstrap.
Data transfer is done by RESTful API for devices. GET and POST is implemented.
We introduced Docker for local development and stable portability. There are two containers defined. app, which runs flask on python, and proxy, which runs Traefik reverse proxy.
app container is enclaving dependencies and this web server. consistent volume is for consistent data storage such as user credentials. It directly maps connection to ttyACM0, ttyACM1, and ttyUSB0.
The reason of using Traefik reverse proxy is for automatic HTTPS certificate renewal. Traefik provides it and integrates very well with Docker.
- Let's Encrypt auto-renewal with given
EMAILandHOSTvariable defined in.envfile. - Traefik dashboard(do not confuse with Tower Dashboard) is accessible within localhost.
- Takes both HTTP(80) and HTTPS(443) requests, HTTP is redirected to HTTPS.
USB connection is accomplished by hardcoded mapping to corresponding devices, which is fragile with USB replugging.