Tech Challenge Winter Semester 18-19

Overview

This is the technical documentation for the tech challenge project Building Sphere by the Triplex group. This repository hosts every subsystem of the project. The codebase is written in Golang( version 1.11.4). It uses Docker(version 18.09.1) as the development infrastructure. To work on this project, you need to have both Golang and Docker installed on your system.

To see the demo, you can visit http://141.40.254.162 , although that server will be undeployed in the future.

For screenshots, you can visit the images folder.

Project Structure

images: Stores the screenshosts of the system.
reinvent: This folder has the codebase for central advertisement system. It creates a server that allows third party companies to add advertisement to system.
Sphere: This folder hosts the main dashboard served to the users. It has 3 functions. It collects real time data from the microcontrollers in the sockets, it processes ads and maps it to certain users and it runs the main dashboard UI.
Socket: Socket is the code to run on microcontrollers in the power sockets. Every 1 minute, it sends the time and the socket ID to the server. If the socket is not being used currently, it doesn't consume electricity.
Test: Hosts the script for random data generation.
db.sql: MySQL database structure. Creates tables used by the system and inserts some mock data. You can directly import this to your database.
docker-compose.yaml: It builds the individual projects and runs them together.
makefile: It compiles individual projects. Just to compile projects run make, to run them make docker. You need to have docker and golang installed on your system.

Running

Make sure you have Golang and docker installed.
Run make docker. If Golang cannot find dependencies, go to sphere folder and run go get.
Once every service starts, go to localhost:8080 and connect to db. Username is root, password is example. Import db.sql to the database.
Go to localhost:4000 to see user dashboard.
Go to localhost:5000 to see reinvent dashboard.

In docker compose , socket deployment is disabled not to pollute the system with data everytime a new deployment is made. You populate data, you can either enable it in docker-compose, or run go run main.go in test folder.

Used technologies

Communication

This project uses MQTT for the communication between sockets and server. Sockets publish to the topic my-topic and server is subscribed to that topic. An MQTT broker is distributed with the docker-compose.yaml in this project. Docker handles networking itself, thus the hostname for the MQTT server is given as mqtt, where the mqtt broker is mapped to.

The raspberry Pi in the building may not be reachable by users if every house uses a private network. To fix this problem, the proposed solution is tunneling from raspberry pi to a public server. This approach still protect the data. It also make the dasboard reachable outside the house.

Database

The system uses MySQL database for data storage. A MySQL instance is distributed with the project.

Sphere uses the db called local. It has 6 tables.

ads: Stores ads data. Every ad has a type and usage information which is used to compare ads with power usage data.
measurements: Stores measurements sent by the sockets. Every socket has a unique id and the time that the measurement was collected.
notifs: Stores notifications. Notifications are simple texts that concern every inhabitant of the building.
promotions: Stores promotions created by ReInvent.
repairs: Stores repair requests from house owners to reinvent. Requests have a status field that shows their completion.
sockets: Stores microcontrolller data used by sockets. Every microcontroller has a unique id, a type and a status. The type is e.g. [Entertainment, Lighting, Cooking, Charging]

ReInvent uses the db called cloud. It has only 1 table and it' identical to ads. Every 24 hour sphere syncs it's local ads table with reinvents table to update visible ads.

To reach the database you can go to port 8080 on your deployment. An additional image called adminer is deployed by the system to allow GUI operations on the database.

Server

Sphere server listens on port 4000. It has a javascript chart library for rendering charts. It uses both ajax and server-side rendering for data retrieval.

Reinvent server listens on port 5000.

Hardware

The reinvent code will be running on the cloud. In the demo, it runs on the LRZ Cloud.
The sphere will be running locally in the building. It is currently deployed to a Raspberry Pi, but more processing might require a better hardware.
The socket code will be running on ESP chips that have Wi-Fi (e.g. Device in Image). Golang can be compiled to almost any environment, thus transporting only the binary is doable.

atakanyenel / tech-challenge-ws-18