Week #20 - June 6th to June 12th - Datalogging Configuration

I started off this week to work on the datalogging portion of the project, but first had to re-configure the whole project so far to put it into separate modules for easier modifications and better control of global variables. It took some time but was well worth it when it came time to incorporate the datalogger portion and eventually the settings and vehicle portion of the program.

This week I was able to get the datalogging feature working on the GUI. The concept is pretty simple in thought but was more difficult to manage as I soon found out. One of the more difficult parts was getting a working version of the InfluxDB working on the raspberry pi. I ended up having to re-install the OS with a 64-bit version in order to accomplish this task. All of the hard work paid off in the end with this wonderful chart of data logged values that were observed on my laptop while remotely accessing the influx database on the raspberry pi.

One of the things that was noticed was missing or corrupted CAN frames that were piling up when interpreting the data, as can be observed with the following error messages in my program. Some of the ID's are too short and the data length were incorrect (everything should have been DL: 8. At the moment the program can ignore these errors using a Try block in python, but I think that I will need to incorporate a hardware filter on the ID's of the message so that it can catch every message correctly.

Because of having to re-installing the OS and the difficulty getting influx to install in the beginning, there was a lot more time devoted to this portion, and I was unable to get the 1-wire temperature sensor configured this week for logging, but I think that next week that should be configured.

We also worked together this week to get Bryan's GUI portion incorporated into the main GUI so that we have a complete display working. Of course, there are still some adjustments to be made, but using Github we should be able to work concurrently and stay up to date.

Because I had to re-install everything on the Raspberry Pi, I took the opportunity to save all of the steps for the report including recommended screenshots of the progress to aid in understanding what needed to be done.

For example, using the Raspberry Pi imager utility.

Setting up the VNC server.

Setting up the influx server (which can easily be done from the desktop environment)