What do you get when you combine a python module that runs as a service, Raspbian, and a Pimoroni GFX Hat? A LAN-wide messaging service with its own distinctive heads-up display. Leverage spare resources across your network to monitor and accept reports from other networked devices. Spy on your network services to make sure they haven’t gone down. Send messages at any of three severity levels from any application.
Modular Design
Piminder is provided as three interoperable payloads. All three are obtainable easily by running pip3 install piminder
.
piminder_helpers
is a convenience module exposing the helper object PiminderService()
. Simply import into your existing application or freshly-created monitoring script, provide the appropriate configuration as its arguments, and use the convience methods info()
, minor()
, and major()
to log messages against the service at that severity level.
piminder_service
is the backend application, which exposes a REST-like API for logging messages and managing credential sets. Available via Docker Hub, the containerized version is easy to maintain as a service and, used appropriately, can be constrained to accept internal messages only. We’re working on a guide on setting that up).
piminder_monitor
is the front-end application. Appropriately daemonized on your Rasberry Pi with Pimoroni GFX Hat, the monitor will continually query the back-end to get messages, and allow you to acknowledge and clear those messages using the GFX hat’s capacitive touch buttons.
Configurable for Use
The piminder_monitor
subpackage provides several useful avenues of configuration:
- The entire font is fully reprogrammable using fontedit, and the source files are provided at the GitHub repo.
- Convenience icons are provided in the font for indicating message severity which may be useful if the user has difficulty distinguishing colours.
- The backlighting LEDs are fully configurable through
monitor.conf
and can be set for both the standby mode and for each level of message severity.