Possible future Cumulus direction

[me_54m]

I think this is a great idea.

A raspberry pi would be ideal for me - I'm seriously considering buying one in anticipation!

[steve]

Progress is slow as I have lots of other things occupying my time (e.g. this forum). I've now got a Beaglebone Black, so I'll be looking to get something running on that too.

[g4ilo]

Steve, I note from the start of this thread that you are a disenchanted Delphi developer. I just wondered if you had heard of Lazarus. It's a clone of Delphi based on Free Pascal that is cross platform and open source. I was a hobbyist programmer using Delphi since the 16-bit version 1, but I switched to Lazarus several years ago and never regretted it.

[steve]

Yes, I've used Lazarus/FPC for a few things. It's pretty good, and seems to be heading in the right direction, unlike Delphi. I've considered porting the engine part of Cumulus, but for now I'm happier with C# and .NET/Mono.

[steve]

I've been having another play with Lazarus/FPC today, and after a bit of a struggle I have some test code which builds on Windows, Linux (on the Raspberry Pi) and OS X, reading data from a FO station using the HIDAPI C library, which I also built for the three platforms. It would be much easier to port the 'engine' part of the existing code to Free Pascal, so I think I'll continue along this path a little further and see what happens...

[mcrossley]

Thanks for the update Steve.

[Dave]

I didn't want to quote your original response to this thread to save space, but what you described sounds like a great plan Steve. I've actually been playing around coding a custom GUI with Python and Pygame lately that I want to use for a large LCD display in our office and had not even begun to consider how I was going to feed it real time data yet. I thought about using a stand-alone industrial LCD display as hardware, but using a RPi rig would keep the cost way down. Bring on your new Cumulus "engine"!

[kasper58]

Hi Steve
Hows the development of the Cumulus on the Pi going.
Regards Warren

[steve]

I've had a version running on a Raspberry Pi non-stop for a few weeks now, reading data from my Fine Offset station, and uploading to a web site without any problems. I still have quite a bit of code to port/rewrite, and it has no user interface yet. There's a little bit more information on another thread somewhere.

[mcrossley]

An old thread, sorry to resurrect it but...

Did you make a decision on the local database to use? MySQL doesn't really work that well on the Pi, so I'm trying SQLite.

My original Pi LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) installation has morphed into LNSP (Linux, nginx, SQLite, PHP) in the quest for small footprint.

[steve]

I'm using an in-memory SQLite database for the 'recent' data (the stuff for the <#Recent...> web tags). It doesn't have an external database as yet, but when I eventually add a local database for 'permanent' data storage, it will almost certainly use SQLite (as Cumulus 2 did). Adding support for MySQL is tricky/expensive for closed-source software, using the Oracle libraries at least. But MariaDB looks good and is compatible with MySQL. It doesn't have the licensing issues that MySQL has, and so if/when I add support for a remote database, I'll probably use that.

[davidrg]

I'm using an in-memory SQLite database for the 'recent' data (the stuff for the <#Recent...> web tags). It doesn't have an external database as yet, but when I eventually add a local database for 'permanent' data storage, it will almost certainly use SQLite (as Cumulus 2 did). Adding support for MySQL is tricky/expensive for closed-source software, using the Oracle libraries at least. But MariaDB looks good and is compatible with MySQL. It doesn't have the licensing issues that MySQL has, and so if/when I add support for a remote database, I'll probably use that.

PostgreSQL is another option. Faster, more reliable/featured/mature and better documented database engine with none of the licensing problems. I'm not sure what the current state of .net support is but I believe Microsoft is planning on supporting it in Entity Framework 7 (along with SQL Server and SQLite) instead of MySQL. Part of their whole "we're cool with linux" open source ASP.net vNext/.net core runtime thing.

Although PostgreSQL has such a nice SQL dialect its a pity to hide it behind an ORM