A little bit of background: I have built a microcontroller-based system to run my heating and hot water system (solar tubes, underfloor heating etc) which works well. This new system replaces an old system written in VB6 which was very reliable, but very untidy, hardware-wise - cables and modules all over the place! The new system is very compact.
The one thing that has been missing is the ability to see what has been happening with all the temperature sensors, pumps, valves etc. The old system used a very clever program written by a guy called Nick Hubbard. This program would take a simple text file, in which each line comprised a time of day, sensor number and temperature, then display these on a chart on the PC. It was incredibly fast and very flexible, allowing zooming and formatting.
This was also useful because I could access it very easily from anywhere in the world simply by using a VNC program. The new system, however, doesn’t use PCs at all. The controller part is linked to a NodeMCU ESP8266 which allows access to the system via the web. However, with very limited storage (a typical day’s data file is around 900K in size) I have decided to write logging data (sensor temperatures and system activities) to a MySQL database on my ISP’s server. This is working very well.
I did think about trying to recreate the Hubbard display program in PHP, but that’s a bit beyond my present capabilities! As an alternative I have written a PHP routine which reads the MySQL database and creates a text file in the identical format to the old system. I can then download this and open it with the program and bingo! I have my historical display of data.
The purpose of this question (you knew I would get there eventually!) is to ask if there is any simple way to do the last part of this procedure. At the moment, I run the PHP program by calling it up in my browser. I then have to use an FTP program to download the text file to my PC and then open the text file with the Display program. There has to be a better way.
I have avoided technical details at this stage as I didn’t want to write even more than I have. However, I am very happy to provide any details to anyone that thinks they might have a good idea as to how to make this whole process more efficient.
Thanks in advance!
