Dashboard

[watsonm]

Hans asked me to repeat the contents of a PM I sent him so that others may benefit.
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I have been trying to see where to start in changing the appearance of the web page.
I want to move the gauges around a bit and maybe adjust their size (as I tend to look at the page on my mobile.)

I get the impression that maybe most of this is done in cumulusutils.ini but cannot see how to shift things around.
Have I missed a descriptive wiki page or do I dive in and mess things up to learn
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(As an impatient soul I started messing with cumulsutils.ini before he could answer )

[freddie]

All the CSS, HTML and Javascript files that control the dashboard are under the "interface" folder of your CumulusMX install. As these files are part of the release, it is not a good idea to make changes. But if you are happy to take a back-up of your changes and re-apply them when there is a new release then that shouldn't be a problem. You will need to have some knowledge of CSS, HTML etc. if you are planning to make changes.

[watsonm]

Thanks Freddie but I was referring to CumulusUtils (my bad!)

[HansR]

I have been trying to see where to start in changing the appearance of the web page.
I want to move the gauges around a bit and maybe adjust their size (as I tend to look at the page on my mobile.)

Hi Mike,

Moving the gauges around is fairly easy and is described in the Wiki Dashboard page.

Resizing the panels is not possible. I made use of the Bootstrap responsive capabilities where the size of the gauges determines the minimum size of the individual panels. The gauges size is small (gaugeSizeSml as defined in the gauges-ss.css) so if you really wish you could hack into the css file and reduce the size of the gauges

Other than that a phone can best be used portrait for the panels to view and landscape to view the charts. But CUtils remains a website and not a true App. And it probably never will be. It was designed for a 1920x1080.

And yes, everything configurable is done in the cumulusutils.ini, translations is done in CUstringsXX.ini (XX stands for the country code) and strings.ini holds the definitions for the ExtraSensors. That is it.

Have fun painting

NOTE: If you need some inspiration: I still have some admiration for Wolfshagen im Harz - Hoko's Wetterstation who managed to create a multilingual version of the CUtils website. This was not truly simple but he did

Other examples of sites showing the configurability of Cutils are:

• L'Alouette Gorey Weather - responsible for the configurable panels, testing the ChartsCompiler and first using the UserReports
• SEGUR-LE-CHATEAU - responsible for many configuration tryout and inventing
• San Sebastian - Arriola not on the map but responsible for all Spanish black template sites and quality suggestions

And while I am at it to point to examples of how one can use CumulusUtils and who contributed, I'll list some more:

• Phil's Backyard - First user for testing pwsFWI
• Weather Roleystone Western Australia - Modular use WITH the runtime system (unsupported) see the other sites in Australia.
• APPIN WEATHER STATION - use of a lot of modules!
• Rjoanddalen - Responsible for the Thrifty qualifier
• KomokaWeather - Valleyview - responsible for the correct working with muliple CMX instances

There are also two other down under who eventually decided CUtils was not for them, but who did contribute ideas during the most turbulent phase of development.

Yes, many users contribute, but these are the most important. H/T

regards,

[watsonm]

Hans,
Many thanks for that. I obviously have a lot more to learn !!
....and some interesting websites to try and match in the future....
Well done to all ..

[freddie]

Thanks Freddie but I was referring to CumulusUtils (my bad!)

Oops sorry I should have checked which subforum this was posted in!

[LindaFNM]

Mike,

I don’t know what, if any experience you may have? I started with zero! Have now spent a happy (I think!!!) couple of months totally hooked on html and css - beware, it becomes somewhat addictive! People are always very willing to help, plus the forum is another useful place for reference material.

If you have no experience at all with anything I found the best way was to get everything running well first. After that, I looked at creating my own User Reports starting with downloading and copying files produced by Andy elsewhere in this forum. I found it useful to create my own reports to experiment with which gave a much deeper understanding of how things worked in general. Just make sure you back things up before doing anything drastic, just in case. I’ll be looking at charts next. Thanks to Hans who has created a utility which enables total beginners to get really involved in websites, even if dinner is sometimes late………
Linda

[watsonm]

Linda,
Thanks for the motivational push

As a retired software engineer from the days when assembler programming was the only thing going I am using this to keep my brain sort of active and so will relish the challenge!!.

[AndyKF650]

Hi Mike

I started out on CMX a couple of years ago and like others have said it really helps to start slow and small. My first foray used CMX locally for a year or so on my local RPi just viewing the software and recording data. I did a little bit of tweaking to the dashboard via editing the interface file just to get my brain into html and css code and how the CMX software hangs together.

My next change was to install and run CUtils locally on the RPi using local Apache2, this then opened up a brave new world of a local website that I could both control and amend. As ever be aware that if you break it you usually have to fix it, constant backups are the solution but there are great superusers out there who can offer advice.

Once I was comfortable with a local site I then took the plunge and went for a public hosted site again this is still infinitely tweakable and Cutils does provide a very good platform to start from. My site has come on hugely from the first foray but time, patience, Google, W3 schools html, this forum, and Hans are all great sources of knowledge.

Best of luck with your journey.

[AndyKF650]

Hi Mike

Referring to your recent message regarding my use of the index.html file, that post re the index file was a long time ago, and I think related to my then method of moving the panels on the home screen around from the standard. Whilst this worked on a local level it became more tedious when I opted for a public website. Every CUtils software upgrade needed me hack the code to ensure my changes persisted, there are lots of upgrades.

The index.html is a core of the website and CUtils and as such is amended by Hans fairly regularly in the upgrades so it will always be required on the website, other reports and pages hang off it so by not regularly sending it to the website(public or local) would run the risk of having the site crash.

Going back to the panels on the CUtils home page these can be adjusted in the .ini file, just change the default pattern to your preference ie rather than Panel-1=Temperature and Panel-2=Pressure I have used the following.
Panel-1=RainText
Panel-2=RainGauge and so on
Once these are set in the .ini file you do not need to change the index.html.

I find that crontab-e is a neat way of getting regular task done automatically, crontab guru is your friend here and will give most of the time frames required. I only have a couple of lines running now, one for the daily update and one for the more rapid updates of UserReports, SysInfo, and UserAskedData as follows

5 1 * * * cd /home/pi/CumulusMX; utils/bin/cumulusutils.exe thrifty website


*/15 * * * * cd /home/pi/CumulusMX; utils/bin/cumulusutils.exe userreports sysinfo UserAskedData

I hope this helps you out.