Hello,
This may be an odd request, so I understand if it’s not something that should be changed, but we use our RS3D’s to collect ambient data for HVSR analysis. I have a script I have put together (basically a fancy timer with inputs, except line 245) that works in the terminal that allows you to set a few parameters, then it lets the Shake acquire data for a certain amount of time (say, 30 minutes) before saving all three channels to a single file in a specified directory and performs a graceful shutdown (see script here).
I train students to collect data who often have little to no computer science background. Basically, I want to make things easier for them and the terminal can be very intimidating. I would like (if possible) to add (for example) a tab to the rs.local browser dashboard where they can just click a few buttons and enter parameters into prespecified fields to run this script.
I am not an expert, but I have made a few data dashboards with HTML/CSS/Javascript, and I think I could manage to put something together if the underlying scripts to create the dashboard are editable. Is this something that can be done? If so, what is the location of file or files I can edit to add a “HVSR” tab (or the like) to the current dashboard.
An alternative to changing the dashboard could be to create a simple GUI front-end for your script that could be run on the student’s computer. It would collect the desired parameters and then run the script remotely on the RS3D. For example, it would not be difficult to write a platform-independent front-end in Python to do the job. An advantage is that both the back-end script on the RS and the GUI front-end would be under your control and could easily be modified by you as your needs change.
Our rs.local/ dashboard is not built on some standard “swap and repurpose” framework, so it would be difficult to implement your idea.
I would also recommend, as dlfowler did, creating your own GUI/dashboard on a computer on the same LAN as the Shake(s) and then acquiring data through that.
In general, something like this:
create the dashboard
set up the parameters as you have described
send the script and accompanying parameters to the shake using the scp command
run the script using ssh to generate the files, after which
a data retrieval button can be pressed back on his dashboard that will fetch the data using scp
Also, but this is only a personal suggestion, you could integrate a command line version (parallel to the dashboard one) for the students who would like to engage with that method. Who knows, maybe there are some future enthusiast programmers in class!