DIY Zoning: Data Acquisition

The new code base, DZ3. Older releases are too old to be easily supported on modern distributions, there's been a lot of code rot since they were released.

No matter which way you go (easy or hard), you need these two:

• RxTx for 1-Wire devices and serial servo controllers
• javax.usb for USB servo controllers

Both of these may or may not be available as packages on your platform. On Ubuntu 9.10, where DZ is currently being developed, RxTx installs with simple sudo apt-get install librxtx-java, but javax.usb requires tinkering.

At this moment, no platform specific packages are available - the code base is moving too fast. As soon as it is stabilized, RPM and Deb packages will be available. For now, go for downloads and get dz-3.0.INSTRUMENTATION.tar.gz - it contains everything you need to run instrumentation right out of the box. Connect your 1-Wire network, run dz-runner, and RRD databases (located in ./rrd) will start filling in. Tinker with configuration (read on) to make graphs more civilized - by default, DZ dumps all data channels into one graph.

Prerequisites

• Maven
• Subversion

Fedora 10+

Try to copy this into a shell script and run it:

	#! /bin/sh
	
	yum install maven2
	yum install svn
	cd ${your_development_directory}
	svn co https://jukebox4.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/jukebox4/trunk/jukebox-master jukebox-master
	(cd jukebox-master && mvn install -Dmaven.test.skip)
	svn co https://diy-zoning.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/diy-zoning/trunk/dz3-master dz3-master
	(cd dz3-master && mvn install -Dmaven.test.skip)

You're done. DZ3 codebase is installed on your box.

Ubuntu 9.04+

The only difference with the above is that instead of executing

	yum install maven2
	yum install svn

you execute

	sudo apt-get install maven2
	sudo apt-get install subversion

DZ is dead without configuration. Fortunately, to boot it a very simple configuration file is required. Here it is:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
		xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
		xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
		http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-2.5.xsd">
        
	<!-- 1-Wire Adapter Driver -->
	<!-- This is a data source for *all* sensor devices on your 1-Wire bus -->
 	<bean id="device_factory" class="net.sf.dz3.device.sensor.impl.onewire.DeviceFactory" init-method="start">
 		<!-- REPLACE THIS WITH YOUR PORT -->
 		<constructor-arg index="0" value="/dev/ttyUSB0"/>    
		<constructor-arg index="1" value="regular"/>    
	</bean>

	<!-- Loggers -->
	<bean id="rrdtool" class="java.io.File">
		<constructor-arg type="java.lang.String" value="/usr/bin/rrdtool"/>
	</bean>
	<bean id="rrdbase_onewire" class="java.io.File">
		<constructor-arg type="java.lang.String" value="./rrd-onewire"/>
	</bean>
	<bean id="rrdlogger_onewire" class="net.sf.jukebox.datastream.logger.impl.rrd.RrdLogger" init-method="start">
 		<constructor-arg index="0" type="java.util.Set">
  		<set>
			<!-- Even though it's just one entry, logger will create separate channels for each sensor -->
   			<ref bean="device_factory"/>
  		</set>
 		</constructor-arg>
 		<constructor-arg index="1" type="java.io.File" ref="rrdbase_onewire"/>
 		<constructor-arg index="2" type="java.io.File" ref="rrdtool"/>
	</bean>

	<!-- JMX configuration -->
	<bean id="jmx-wrapper" class="net.sf.jukebox.jmx.JmxWrapper">
 		<constructor-arg index="0" type="java.util.Set">
  			<set>
   				<ref bean="device_factory"/>
  			</set>
 		</constructor-arg>
	</bean>
</beans>
        	

Looking at the example above, you may have already figured that it is based on Spring Framework. Being familiar with Spring and having a brief glance at DZ code base will give you a complete idea of what to do next.

Nevertheless, more configuration examples will be coming up in further sections.

Now that your computer is busy collecting sensor data, you must be definitely concerned with visualization.