IoT Alarm Clock - Part 3

8 Jun 2014

Previous blog posts for this project:

Setting up the webserver
Web app development
Enclosure progress
Next post

This post focuses mainly on the build of the enclosure (lots of pictures!), but starts off with installation of some software components to get the web application running.

Setting up the webserver

Install the "lighttpd" webserver on the pi:

pi@raspberrypi ~ $ sudo apt-get install lighttpd

Edit the configuration to enable CGI support with Perl:

pi@raspberrypi ~ $ sudo nano /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf

server.modules = (
        "mod_access",
        "mod_alias",
        "mod_compress",
        "mod_redirect",
        "mod_cgi",
        "mod_rewrite",
)

$HTTP["url"] =~ "^/cgi-bin/" {
        cgi.assign = (
                ".pl" => "/usr/bin/perl" ,
                ".cgi" => "/usr/bin/perl" ,
        )
}

Create a test CGI script to verify the correct functioning of the webserver:

pi@raspberrypi ~ $ cd /var/www/
pi@raspberrypi /var/www $ mkdir cgi-bin
pi@raspberrypi /var/www $ cd cgi-bin/
pi@raspberrypi /var/www/cgi-bin $ sudo nano test.cgi

#!/usr/bin/perl

print "<html>";
print "<head>";
print "<title>A Simple Perl CGI</title>";
print "</head>";
print "<body>";
print "<h1>A Simple Perl CGI</h1>";
print "<p>Hello World</p>";
print "</body>";
print "</html>”;

pi@raspberrypi /var/www/cgi-bin $ sudo chmod +x test.cgi

Success! The test script works.

Web app development

I started development on the web application in charge of the configuration of the alarm clock.

To have something modern looking and compatible with mobile devices, I used Bootstrap and JQuery.

Using Perl and the iRail API, I am able to populate the web application with the required information.

Here's a test where a dropdown is populated with data retrieved via the API:

Enclosure progress

I made a lot of progress on the enclosure for my alarm clock.

In the last post, I had started cutting the parts of the enclosure. I cut grooves in the four sides in order to be able to add a back panel.

Everything fitted properly, and the result was very clean looking.

It was time to add the electronics to the enclosure. By using some PVC screws which were glued to the bottom panel, I was able to mount the Arduino and Raspberry Pi.