RPi to GUI discussion

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Hi, I have a real world application and would like some feedback.

I have inherited a RPi4 application that collects data from a few sensors in Outback Australia.
Temperature, atmospheric pressure and a few other similar sensors. It has a few solar panels and batteries.

My goal is to make a one page GUI Graphical User Interface on the RPi4 so when any of our team VNC into the Pi we can see the current status and some real time data and maybe a graph with trends of temperature and battery voltage. I would like a few push buttons to initiate some commands to open and close a few valves.

Looking at options everything looks very script based. PyQT and Flask have been discussed.
One suggestion was to make a powerpoint of what I want the page to look like and build from there.

How would you go about it?

Dave D

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For data visualization I love DearPyGui. :slight_smile:
Give it a try.

Would you prefer something that has requires less experience with code?

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I have a steep learning curve on Python and any GUI application.

I have built many SCADA systems and would love a simple GUI builder if it is available.

DD

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Does it need to be free or would you be willing to pay for a yearly licence?

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Apologies for the delay.

Ideally a free software package but I am open to all options.

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Hey @Dave_here,

If you haven’t looked into it too far yet I would recommend PyQt, I have had some success with it in the past and didn’t find it that difficult to get into. DearPyGui that Pixmusix recommended also looks pretty cool.

These links helped me get started and may be worth a skim if you are interested in going in this direction.

Hopefully, someone else has some other suggestions for free software packages to achieve this kind of thing.

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You could pay a subscription to a website designer like wix or square-space etc.
You wouldn’t need to pay for a domain, since you could host the website locally on your raspberry pi.

If you would like free and it’s only for viewing data… you could always consider google sheets?
Both of the above require basically no coding skill and come with the necessary compromises :slight_smile:

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I really appreciate the replies.

If I outsourced the task, where would i look?

Dave

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Hey Dave,

There are quite a few options for outsourced code, though Pixmusix has listed the top conteders for something like this:

Other than that you can look into using Upwork, Fiver or even Freelancer to find someone to get it built for you.

Cheers,
Blayden

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That looks amaazing…

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So I want to try a simple test

have a window open on the desktop and have it display the status of Pin 19 (it flashes a led)

If I have a simple program called led_flash.py
Where pin 19 (output to an LED) flashed on and off

I would like to have a GUI indicate the status pin 19 of the GPIO on the RPi4 desktop

If you know a youtube tutorial that would be great.

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The status of that pin will be whatever you have set it to in order to turn the LED on or off. So the simple way to show the status would be to print a message whenever the LED is turned on or off. If you show the code you are using then someone may be able to provide an example or a link to the reference for the code you need.

But showing the status of a pin would usually be something you do when that pin is an input and is changing for some other reason, such as someone pressing a button. Is that what you want to accomplish?

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Hey @Dave_here,

Raspberry Pi has a pretty good starting guide for creating GUIs.
https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/projects/getting-started-with-guis/0

It shouldn’t be too big of a step to work this into your current led_flash.py code to have it output its state to a GUI.