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5. Software structures

A placeholder section for future expansion of the project software modules and documentation thereof. Scope, behaviors, interdependencies, and interactions of the components will be documented here to permit the addition of customizations.

5.1 File formats

All files are human-readable (i.e. regular text files viewable by any text editor, and likewise printable) and line-oriented. Comments can be embedded by starting a line with the # character -- these lines will be ignored by the programs that parse the files. In general, fields of key-words and/or data are white-space separated (tabs and/or spaces) and do not extend beyond the end-of-line character.

Sensors.cnf

A large and exhaustive file specifying the total configuration of the monitoring station. There is a section of global settings, followed by 'paragraphs' describing each datalogger-site.

datlog

The sollog process will always open this file in APPEND mode and begin with a time-stamp line that is commented out with a leading '#'. Thereafter each line consists of:

{datalogger-id-#} {time-stamp} {sensor#1} {sensor#2} ...

datalogger-id

id# of the datalogger that this record is from

time-stamp

integer representation of time/date of the readings

sensor-#?

readings from each of the sensors in the order declared in the configuration file Sensors.cnf

5.2 Command Sets

All live InterProcess Communication is accompished with TCP/IP SOCKETs using a proprietary port-id and custom command set. Thus should further development be necessary, this command set can easily be expanded. Currently it is limited to instructions to retrieve current sensor readings and setting new alarm trigger points.

5.3 Data Structures

A placeholder section for future expansion of the project software modules and documentation thereof. Internal shared data structures will be documented here to permit development of more sophisticated IPC (InterProcess Communications) protocols should the need arise.


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