REXYGEN Community Forum

contactform

Member

Registered: 2015-10-30

Posts: 45

Suggestions

Hi. I'm planning to develop a home automation solution next year and REX Control System looks very promising. The UniPi looks interesting too.
I suggest you implement a notification module for the HMI web component for sending alerts via email and SMS, and posting content on Facebook and Twitter. That would make your product complete. Even those who are looking to develop industrial automation solutions would benefit from the alerting feature. I really think it's a MUST even if you increase the price.
Also, I recommend choosing Nginx instead of Lighttpd as the web server. Lighttpd still has problems with memory leaks and CPU consumpson as of 2015, or so I've been told. The experts say Nginx is the most stable, efficient and secure web server. Thank you.

jaroslav_sobota

Administrator

Registered: 2015-10-27

Posts: 535

Re: Suggestions

Hi, thanks for all your feedback and suggestions.

At the moment it is possible to implement e-mail notification using the EPC function block, which triggers execution of arbitrary external program or script (Python, C, shellscript, etc.). The same holds for Facebook and Twitter. In short - if you can do it from command line, you can do it using the EPC function block.

SMS alerting is also possible, you can send AT commands to your GSM module over the serial line (UART) using the REXLANG programmable function block.

We understand the importance of both these alerting methods so we'll make it more straightforward.

As for the webserver, there are major changes planned. But I'll pass your message to the development team for sure.

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Monarco HAT for Raspberry Pi - Lightweight I/O for monitoring, archiving and control.
Raspberry Pi in industrial automation!

jaroslav_sobota

Administrator

Registered: 2015-10-27

Posts: 535

Re: Suggestions

See our GitHub repository, I have added an example on sending e-mail notifications from REX control algorithms.

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Monarco HAT for Raspberry Pi - Lightweight I/O for monitoring, archiving and control.
Raspberry Pi in industrial automation!

hendrik

Member

Registered: 2015-11-01

Posts: 49

Re: Suggestions

Hi, I uninstalled Lighttpd server & installed Nginx server to compare performance. The default index.html is saved in /var/www; the rex index.html file is saved in /rex/hmi. I am not sure how to replace the default index.html with Rex html. Do you have any ideas please?

I used a test file to make sure that NGINX html is working - all ok. I also tested php and again all ok.

jaroslav_sobota

Administrator

Registered: 2015-10-27

Posts: 535

Re: Suggestions

At this moment our HMI will not work with Nginx. You would get the webpage though (HTML), but not the live data from your running algorithm (websocket connection). You have to use lighttpd.

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Monarco HAT for Raspberry Pi - Lightweight I/O for monitoring, archiving and control.
Raspberry Pi in industrial automation!

hendrik

Member

Registered: 2015-11-01

Posts: 49

Re: Suggestions

ok thanks,

jsimpkin

Member

Registered: 2016-02-15

Posts: 1

Re: Suggestions

On the note of the HMI is there a way of showing it on the some GUI on a screen directly connected to the PI - so you can see values at the machine it is running with out needing to use a computer and the browser based HMI?

thanks

Last edited by jsimpkin (2016-02-16 05:00:23)

jaroslav_sobota

Administrator

Registered: 2015-10-27

Posts: 535

Re: Suggestions

Yes, no problem! You just run the web browser (e.g. Chromium) in full screen (or kiosk mode) and it will display your HMI. You just have to boot to the graphical user interface of your Raspberry Pi, which is the default behavior in the latest Raspbian releases.

There is a selection of displays available for your Raspberry Pi, e.g. the official RPi display or Adafruit displays.

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Monarco HAT for Raspberry Pi - Lightweight I/O for monitoring, archiving and control.
Raspberry Pi in industrial automation!