Page has been tested for compliance with INDUSTRY (not MS-only) standards, using the free, publicly accessible validator at validator.w3.org. (Copy your page's URL to your clipboard before clicking on the icon.)This page is about a Windows program in my FarWatchWatcher series. And this time I am giving the .exe for it away, free. (Previously, I described what my FarWatchWatcher programs could do, but left it to you to write your own versions.)
It's really, truly free. You don't have to register with me, etc, etc.
Why? I want to encourage people to play with the idea of Arduservers. (Or similar webservers in a different bit of hardware.
Click this to download FWW008 (https://wywtk.com/fww/zips/fww008-24820.zip)That will give you the Windows .exe, an ini file, some data (to get you going), and a ReadMe.txt in a .zip file.
(Ini files: What we did before "the registry" came along. It has its place. For for simple little apps like FWW008 an ini file is THE ANSWER! Lifewire posted a bit of information about ini files for us. Wikipedia also has a good page. Lifewire says users don't often edit them by hand. There are a few tweaks to FWW008's ini file that you might want to do by hand. See comments in the ini file provided.)
When you have played a bit with FWW008 and an suitable Arduserver, you may want to check what it says at the FWW008 Versions, "Features" (bugs!), Fixes and Plans page. (It is, I fear, very rough and ready for now.)
Before we go into details, here's an un-spoilt screenshot of graphics created by FWW008. (The graphics window is just one of the windows created by the program. There are others for settings, and with the data displayed as text.)
It is astonishingly easy to create a little webserver that reports 7 data, as they stand when you access the webserver. The hardware costs about (£40). I say "easy". It isn't a project for a complete beginner... but compared to what it used to take to create a webserver it is fabulous.
The following page explains the hardware, after opening with a screenshot of what the webserver returns.
https://wywtk.com/ardsrv/ardsrv_23518_2t2h_door.htm
The software for the server, ar202, is free. You can download the Arduino sourcecode here.
Before ar202 there was ar787. (It is a similar Arduserver I made earlier.) Ar787's page might well be helpful to anyone trying to use ar202. Both are "late models", filled with lessons learnt in many earlier Arduservers... ar747 was far from the first in the family tree.)
Once you have one of those, you fire up something like my program FWW008, and it checks what the webserver is serving from time to time, and draws a graph. (And saves the data in a machine readable file.) (New 8/24: I DO offer the program to the public. But for some readers, this page is also to inspire you to write your own! Maybe share a simple version in the language you use with that language's community?) (I offer FWW008's .exe (Windows)... but not the sourcecode.)
The other graphs in the examples here come from a predecessor of FWW008... but they both produce nearly the same results. The differences you may notice arise mostly from the settings that a user can control.
Data in the left-hand-most column is the OLDEST data on the page. It is about to "fall off the edge". I hope you have now guessed that the data in the right-hand-most column is the newest data on the page. (All of the graph's contents are shifted to the left a tiny bit at regular intervals. If the speed can't yet be set by the user, that WILL be possible one day.)
The bit of the graph in the illustration shows is for about the past 30 hours. (Three and a half days, in the case of the FWW008 example... the vertical magenta lines are when midnight was each day. The section at the left with the diagonal green line (and no Midnight bars) was reloaded from the data log to the screen when the program was booted, which was about three days before the time the screenshot was taken.)
Two relative humidities... the bumpy blue lines near bottom of page. (Promoted... by settings... to the top of the FWW008 example above.
The straight blue lines above and below the sensor readings graphs show where...
- in the upper graph: 0% and 100%, and
- in the lower graph: 40% and 60%
would be plotted. Knowing that, you can interpret the graphs as showing that the relative humidities bumped along at about 60% in the upper graph. The different settings in the lower graph make slight changes in the humidities it was plotting more apparent... without using more vertical space on the graph page.
Two temperatures... the wavy red lines. Straight lines show where 60 and 70 degrees Fahrenheit lie... so in the upper graph the temperatures ranged from about 70 to 74. The lower red data line in the upper graph is jagged because a refrigerator was struggling in the warm weather, and cam on about 4 times in each 6 hour interval.
The interrupts due to door being open... flat red line at bottom i n graph at left, the magenta line above... In the case at the left, it wasn't opened. In the upper graph you can see times when it was closed (not rising) and open... rising "forever", but the plot "wrapped", to constrain it to one band of the graphs vertical scope.
The state of the digital input when polled... flat green line in graph to left (always in one state), black line in upper graph. Look closely, and you will see that it was closed for about 17 hours ending about three hours before the screenshot was taken.
The "health" of the device... the diagonal gray (graph to left)/ golden (upper graph) lines. (Like that, they say "device running smoothly"). (It is just a coincidence that they are bounded by the red and green lines in the lower graph. A tweak of the settings... which the user can make... would remove that coincidence.)
In FWW008, the user can determine all line colors, and where the flat line pairs indicating the y dimension scales lie on the graph.
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The latest data is at the right hand edge of the graph. The vertical magenta line marks midnight in the place where FWW008 was running. ("Far Watch Watcher"). The vertical gray lines mark 6 am, noon, PM.
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So now you know. Wasn't that FASCINATING???
Well... if you insist. Here's a bit of a display from the old FWW arising from watching an Arduserver very like the one described in the page cited above. The Arduserver was running ar202... also similar to what the described Arduserver was running.
This idea may seem of little value. But if you think about it, it could have merit in some circumstances.
Imagine a house you don't have frequent access which has an "always on" computer with a copy of FWW008 running. And, quite apart from the Arduserver that FWW008 is fetching readings from, the computer running FWW008 is also a webserver. If FWW008 was given the power to periodically save an image file to someplace on the computer's backing store, then the following becomes possible:
The computer (at the unvisited house) would have a page of .html on it... a page that included a "display this image file" tag in it.
And yes, you'd set the page up to display the (periodically changing) image from FWW008!
With that modest little stratagem, you could "look at" the graph FWW008 was building just by accessing the page the computer was serving up!
Yes! You COULD run a copy of FWW008 where ever you happened to be, see what the sensors had been reporting "directly". But that means another "always on" computer, and it doesn't give you a way to check the graph unless you are at the second "always on" computer. With the stratagem, all you need is a web browser... on your smartphone, for instance.
Setting up your own webserver isn't trivial, but it isn't rocket science, either.
The need for a DYNDNS service is the biggest nuisance and expense.
Please get in touch if you discover flaws in this page. Please mention the page's URL. (wywtk.com/fw/fww008-intro.htm).
If you found this of interest, please mention in forums, give it a Facebook "like", Google "Plus", or whatever. If you want more of this stuff, help!? There's not much point in me writing these things, if no one feels they are of any use.
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