How can I display data in a table (through software or a webpage)?

Question

I want to send a text file from my Raspberry Pi (Raspbian Jessie) to my PC (Windows) via GSM, this file contains about twenty parameters of a vehicle (ex: level = 20 L).

After that I want to display these parameters in a table.

Questions:

1. What should be created to display this table (a software or a server or a simple web page)?

2. Is is it necessary to create a data base to be able to send the parameters of several vehicles instead of one?

3. Is it necessary to establish a communication protocol between the Pi and the PC (I need some explanation for this part)?

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Answer 1

Seems like an IoT question, but anyway.

You should define your project better. Usually then we start planing a project, we first list what we expect from the system.

I guess that you want your system to:

• Set up a server to gather data (you need a web server)
• Support multiple clients (clients need an ID)
• Save data from each client (you need a database on the server)

Since you mentioned GSM, I guess each client (each Raspberry Pi) will have a configured and working GSM module to provide an internet connection. Additional each client should have a unique ID in order to let the server know which client's the data are. You may combine the ID with a password, so you can configure each client with a username-password pair.

Your server (your PC) should be online when a client try to send their data and accessible from outside your network. This means that your PC should be always online, and have a public static IP or a DDNS and update his public IP or a DDNS on your local modem/rooter and a port forwarding to your PC on the local network. Then you should set up any web-server and define a simple API for the data submission and the data display. For additional security you should be able to configure a SSL certification on the web-server.

For example you can set up an Apache web server with an SQL database and a static IP. You then create 2 php files, submit.php and view.php. The submit.php would take the username and the password, validates them and then save the 20 parameters and the username on the SQL (maybe add a timestamp too, if you want to have history data). The view.php could have a simple admin login system and then show the data on a table as you like.

Then your clients could just make a HTTPS POST request to the server (at an interval, for example every 1 hour), example with curl:

curl -d "username=<username-here>&password=<password-here>&level=<value>&other=<value>" https://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/submit.php

In the same way you can setup a node.js server. If you don't care to save the data between server shut downs, in node.js you can just save each client's data on a variable.

The way you send the data (in a file or by just posting each parameter) is irrelevant. You may want to minimize the data usage due to GSM internet costs (for example don't sent unchanged variables).

• Hi Cham: thank you very much, that's what I was looking for as an explanation.
• GramThanos: @HiCham you may select it as accepted answer if this is what you were looking for.