MEAN_App

As part of my Higher Diploma in Software Design and Development, I wanted to create an application that would show live data and what better way to get live data than to get it yourself. The Raspberry Pi was perfect for this. Providing GPIO pins to read in data and at a relatively cheap price. I purchased a bread board and wired up a temperature sensor. When it came to choosing a stack, I felt the MEAN stack was a great option as JavaScript could be used across all technologies and a relational database wasn’t required for temperature data like this. I created a RESTful API which would respond to queries for previous data or the current temperature. AngularJS was then used to request the data and place it on the $scope object. A directive was then created which contained D3.js, a JavaScript library for creating dynamic visualisations. This used to create two visualizations, a circle which changed size and colour with temperature and a graph showing the last 20 seconds of data. The create a single page application, the ui-router module was used. Originally the ngRoute module was used but this fell short when nested views inside views which was how the graph and circle were altered. The web app also required authentication, which was done using JWTs (JavaScript Web Tokens). Once the web app was finished, I made a mobile app using the Ionic framework with some minor tweaks to the code and a new UI.