POPSICL

POPSICL - Proactive Optimization of Physics Space Integrated Climate Logging

How to Make a POPSICL

Acquire the following items:
Raspberry Pi Pico W
DHT20 Temperature and Humidity Sensor
Wires
Popsicle Sticks
Solder
Soldering Iron

Part 1: Programming the Raspberry Pi Pico

Part 1.A: Setting Up the Pico

You’re going to want to have Thonny installed on your computer. It is like an IDE/Code Editor specifically for raspberry pi computers and microcontrollers. Once you have that, take your Pico, push and hold the BOOTSEL button and plug your Pico into your computer. Release the BOOTSEL button after your Pico is connected. It will mount as a Mass Storage Device called RPI-RP2. Go to this website to download the UF2 file that will allow the Pico to read Micropython (make sure to install the latest version!), the language this project was done in. Drag and drop the MicroPython UF2 file onto the RPI-RP2 volume. Your Pico will reboot. You are now running MicroPython.

Part 1.B: Importing the code to the device:

Plug in the pico to your computer (without pressing any buttons). In a terminal, navigate to the pico_files folder of this repo. Then run:

rshell --buffer-size=30 -a -p /dev/tty.usbmodemXXXXX "cp *py /pyboard/"

where the tty... will be the address of the specific USB device on your system. This will vary with each pico and different operating systems. You should be able to install rshell with just a pip install rshell.

Then you can unplug/replug the device to reboot it and you're done!

If you want to monitor the serial output, you can use screen:

screen  /dev/tty.usbmodemXXXXX

and watch whatever print statements are in main.py

Part 2: Register the device in POPSICL spreadsheet

Use the serial output to find the MAC address and password. Plug the device in and quickly run a screen command described above. Note these values in the central spreadsheet.

Part 2: Register the device on the UT network

Goto netreg.utk.edu to register that mac address, giving the host the unique name of the device (e.g. Popsicl-01). This will allow the device to connect to the UT wifi.

Part 3: Adding a device to the database

In the inFluxDB web interface, go to the InFluxDB Admin menu > Users. Add a user having the name of the MAC of the device, and put in the password. This will allow the device to write new data to the DB.

Notes for how the database was set up and how to restart it if needed

Follow the instructions on this website in order to set the docker image. This will run Chronograf, Influxdb and Grafana in a docker image on your machine.

docker run -d \
  --name docker-influxdb-grafana \
  -p 3003:3003 \
  -p 3004:8083 \
  -p 8086:8086 \
  -v /userdata/popsicl_db/influxdb/:/var/lib/influxdb \
  -v /userdata/popsicl_db/grafana/:/var/lib/grafana \
  -v /userdata/popsicl_db/chronograf/:/root/ \
  philhawthorne/docker-influxdb-grafana:latest

(Used to use philhawthorne/docker-influxdb-grafana:latest. Switched to the edge tag to get a newer version of the software to allow for passwords.)

To stop the image, run

docker stop docker-influxdb-grafana

and to start it run

docker start docker-influxdb-grafana

To create a database in influxdb, you'll need to communicate through the port you chose for it to run on through the use of the curl command. Here's how to make a new database with the name 'mydb':

curl -i -XPOST http://localhost:8086/query --data-urlencode "q=CREATE DATABASE mydb"

Now data from your popsicl can be posted to mydb through that port.

If you want to enable security, you'll need to create an admin user of the database. Then you'll need to ssh into the docker image using

docker exec -it docker-influxdb-grafana bash

and follow the instructions here to enable authentication.

When starting up a fresh docker container, you need to go into the docker image (see above) and run

cp supervisord.conf.bkup /etc/supervisor/conf.d/supervisord.conf
cp influxdb.conf /etc/influxdb/influxdb.conf
supervisorctl reread
supervisorctl update
supervisorctl restart influxdb

jslawless / POPSICL

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