MMDVMHost-Websocketboard

Introduction

This is a very first development version of my new MMDVMDashboard using websockets-technology to get rid of high load on Raspberry Pi and others and keep those temperature down.

Also this should improve user experience.

Key Features

• Websockets for reducing load on the hotspot/repeater
• Currently TXing on all timeslots
• Last-Heard-List
• QSO-net-management
• Local Heard-List
• DAPNET messages with decoding of Skyper-messages, -rubrics and METAR-messages
• System-Info-panel for visualize system health
• Automatically detecting clients timezone for displaying timestamps in local behavior
• Easier to customize the html-page because client-part persists in html and javascript-files

Technical Details

The Dashboard persists in detail in 3 components: two on the server (Hotspot/Repeater) side and on on the browser.

The two server sided components are the logtailer.py (which communicates via websocket with your browser and streams the logs to it for processing) and the webserver-component from python3 (which is serving the needed html and javascript infrastructure to your browser).

The client based component is the javascript processing the streamed log lines and filling the tables.

Used Ports

By default following Ports are used for running the Dashboard:

• 8000 TCP: webservice
• 5678 TCP: Websocket

Installation

You'll need to install several python3 modules. A concrete list will follow here later. Actually known:

• websockets: sudo apt install python3-websockets
• ansi2html: sudo pip3 install ansi2html
• gpiozero: sudo apt install python3-gpiozero
• psutil: sudo apt install python3-psutil
• pyserial: sudo apt-get install python3-serial

Recommendations

• Take care to set Loglevel for FileLevel = 2 in your MMDVM.ini
• Also set debug = 0 on each section to avoid irritating output on the Dashboard
• At least Python3.7 should be installed

Installation steps

• First of all (if not already done by installation of MMDVMHost): create a syetemuser with sudo adduser --system --no-create-home --group mmdvm
• Also add the new user to the group "dialout" with usermod -a -G dialout mmdvm
• Add following line to /etc/sudoers with sudo visudo for getting the logtailer access to MMDVMHost: www-data ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /usr/local/bin/MMDVMHost
• Clone this repository to your home-directory with git clone --recurse-submodules -j8 https://github.com/dg9vh/MMDVMHost-Websocketboard to clone the repository with it's submodules
• Create directory with sudo mkdir /opt/MMDVMDash
• Copy all files from repository into this folder
• Change ownership to user mmdvm for example with sudo chown -R mmdvm:mmdvm /opt/MMDVMDash
• Modify logtailer.ini to fit your needs
• Modify /html/js/config.js to fit your needs, here you can switch on/off tabs showing or enable debug for getting some output in javascript console. You should take a look into this file - here are different options you can configure.
• Copy files in /opt/MMDVMDash/systemd to /etc/systemd/system or similar corresponding to your system
• Modify both scripts to fit your needs
• Enable services with following commmands, this results in starting both automatically after reboot:
  • sudo systemctl enable http.server.service
  • sudo systemctl enable logtailer.service
• Start services with following commmands:
  • sudo systemctl start http.server.service
  • sudo systemctl start logtailer.service

Finally you should be able to get the new Dashboard by calling the hostname of your Hotspot/Repeater and port 8000 (default) in your browser.

Troubleshooting

If you have any trouble running the software most things depend on the logtailer-component. So it is a good idea to try starting the software on the console with python3 ./logtailer.py to see the output of the program. A common error is missing python-libraries you should install with the commands mentioned above.

If you find any further missing library let me know! Just open an issue!

If there are problems with paths for logfiles you also could get some impressions with the output of the program.

If using DMRHost by BrandMeister-Team

If you are using the DMRHost as replacement for MMDVMHost you should enable DMR-ID-Lookup within logtailer.ini by setting the corresponding option = 1 Also take care to configure the filepath to the correct location of your DMRIds.dat.

To update the DMRIds.dat file, you can use the script found in scripts-folder.

Configuration of Talkgroup-Textes in "Target"-column

You will find a file in /html/data called "TG_List.csv" that is a comma-separated file of following format:

MODE,TS,TG,LABEL,URL
DMR,1,263,DL Multimode BM,
DMR,2,8021,Pegasus DMR-DL,
DMR,2,2625,RLP/SL BM,
YSF,0,1,Local Parrot,
YSF,0,2,DEV Reflector,
YSF,0,10,YSF2DMR TG26250,
YSF,0,40,DL Multimode 263,https://c4fm.ysfreflector.de/Germany/

First row leave untouched for orientation. The other lines contains on first column the DMR-timeslot the TG is used, second column contains the talkgroup-number and third column contains the label you want to be shown in the target-column of the dashboard. The last column can contain an URL to any dashboard or homepage you like to point to. If no URL is given, on DMR-Mode the corresponding Last-Heard-List for the talkgroup in BrandMeister-Network is linked.

Please edit this file to your needs. It may change on developer-side from time by time so when updating keep a copy of your personal list to modify/edit it.

If you do not want to have this Talkgroup-textes in your dashboard, simply remove all but the first line in this file.

Installation Best Practices

For getting the best user experience it is recommended to configure your MMDVMHost and other G4KLX-software with the following parameter:

FileRotate=0

This results in having only one logfile for each program and having it rotated by your linux-system with logrotate if configured.

You should also configure your logtailer.ini with

FileRotate=False

to have the logtailer in correct behaviour for reading this file.

To configure log rotation in Linux take a look at https://www.tecmint.com/install-logrotate-to-manage-log-rotation-in-linux/.

Credits

logtailer.py is based on the work of http://shzhangji.com/blog/2017/07/15/log-tailer-with-websocket-and-python/

Screenshots