The Final Stretch: Bringing it all together

For the past week, and for the upcoming week, I’ve been and will be working on bringing a little of everything that I’ve done with- and learned from -Olympus this summer into one final project. I’m working on turning the raw Python plugins that I created earlier this summer into plugins that can be viewed through they Olympus GUI itself. That will make them the first fully functioning pair of plugins in Olympus, and hopefully an excellent proof of what it can do. For now, I’ve completed the plugins themselves and most of the debugging that went along with them, and now I’m working on actually visualizing their output using the Olympus front end.

More UI changes

Several mistakes later, I’ve nearly finished the first stage of UI changes. For now, it consists of a series of buttons that you can press to change the colors of the already existent interface. Next, I’m going to be adding the ability for the program to: Save which settings you’ve chosen; Add images as backgrounds for the overall UI; and a slider to change the background color and the text color more dynamically. After that, its on to additional graphing options/graphical representations of data. Because Olympus will be a program which you download onto your root and node servers, instead of one which is run on a central server, these changes will be affected in the file itself, so it should be relatively easy to save them permanently without use of a login screen or password.

More UI changes

Several mistakes later, I’ve nearly finished the first stage of UI changes. For now, it consists of a series of buttons that you can press to change the colors of the already existent interface. Next, I’m going to be adding the ability for the program to: Save which settings you’ve chosen; Add images as backgrounds for the overall UI; and a slider to change the background color and the text color more dynamically. After that, its on to additional graphing options/graphical representations of data. Because Olympus will be a program which you download onto your root and node servers, instead of one which is run on a central server, these changes will be affected in the file itself, so it should be relatively easy to save them permanently without use of a login screen or password.

Vacation Update

Greetings from vacation! I’ve made some more progress on user-customization of the Olympus UI. I’m currently working the bugs out of a few different themes that people can use to better personalize their Olympus experience. Unfortunately, this is probably the last time that I will have internet access before early next week, so the working code will probably go up then. I am also trying to work out a way to actually access the running Olympus front end from here (After all that I said about making it publicly addressable, it’s sitting behind the firewall at my apt. in Troy.) If I can do that, I’ll also be testing some new data visualization code that I’m working on (Line graphs and lines of best fit, woo hoo!)

UI Update No. 1

Finally, after quite a bit of time working on HTML, (and with the completion of my Strengths of Materials exams) I’m back on task with Olympus. I’ve made a few minor changes to the web interface, including the addition of the Olympus symbol and a few deletions/modifications to the user options. I’m having a little trouble pushing to github after reimaging, but I’ll have my new code up tomorrow, and with vacation coming on and nothing else to do, I expect to be churning out UI changes over the next few weeks!

HTML Learning website!

 

I found this site (which provides tutorials for HTML on all skill levels. It’s really helping me, and anyone who wants to learn should check it out as well.

Some HTML

I’ve begun to work on the front end of Olympus this week by delving into the world of HTML. This isn’t my first experience with webpages and HTML, but it will be the first time I’ve gone this far down the rabbit hole. Plugin development is on hold until I get some help with some of the more complex python-windows interactions, most of which seem to be best done using various downloaded modules to allow for communication. Until I get some help from some higher level programmers, I’m going to be adding functionality to the UI on the front end of Olympus.

Continued Python Digestion, Week 3

I successfully fixed my previous python problem! I’ve also made significant progress on my HDD space program, and on a new plugin to measure processor capacity and draw. I’m going to be enlisting the help of a fellow RCOS member or two to help me write this one, but progress is getting faster! Soon I’m going to move on to working on the Olympus front end as well as plugins.

Progress is slow thanks to python’s constrictions

I’m having trouble interfacing python with my windows computer. It can’t seem to load the functions in the win32com module, which appears to be necessary to interact with windows in any reasonable fashion (it says no such module exists, but the module is listed in the standard set for python 2.7.1). If any python experts out there can help me out with this I would be much obliged. It’s really holding me up right now.

Beginner’s Journey into the belly of Python

My name is James Kalfas; I’m new to the Olympus project, new to Python, and a mechanical engineer so this is my first major endeavor into the wide world of applied programming. I’ve been brought onto the Olympus project to work on the diversity of plugins that are available for use on the Olympus servers. So far, I’ve completed a program that will allow remote servers to send their current ram usage, available ram, and an optional % of total ram in use to the root server. Currently, I’m working on a similar program for total HDD usage. After that, I intend to move on to other hardware plugins, as well as integrating third-party programs such as ventrilo and minecraft into the plugin list.

James Kalfas