[time-nuts] beaglebones, time, web services

[Jim Lux]

I've got a project I'm working on to make a sophisticated sundial with 
moving mirrors.  I've got a batch of Arduinos that move the mirrors to 
the appropriate places, given the current sun angle, etc.

I've got a beaglebone that runs some python code to calculate sun angle 
based on time

The beaglebone will have a GPS feeding it to get time.

BUT now, I'd like to add a web interface, so that it can be manipulated 
by a mobile device using a browser.

One way I can think of is to run some sort of limited web server. there 
are a couple that come with the beaglebone, including the python 
"simplehttpserver".

But I'm sort of stuck on the interface between the webserver and the 
other code running.

I've done this kind of thing where the one task goes out and updates 
files in the tree that's being served by the web server, and that works 
fine for "status display" kinds of things that don't update very 
quickly. It's also nicely partitioned.

but I want to be able to change the behavior of the system (e.g. by 
having the server respond to a PUT or something)

Is the best scheme to go in and modify the webserver code to look for 
specific URLs requested, and then fire off some custom code to do what I 
want?

I'm not particularly interested in javascript, and would prefer python.


Or are there libraries that make this more cookbook? (the little 
"getting started with beaglebone" book talks about flask)

There's quite a few websites out there where someone has done some sort 
of "home automation", but they tend to be a bit light on the analysis of 
pros and cons of implementation architectures: "I built X using Y and Z 
and it sort of works".


Actually, along a similar line.. my "solar position" code isn't very 
pretty (it's sort of replicating some code I wrote in Basic a long time 
ago, with some changes from stuff I cribbed from ccmatlab).  If someone 
knows of a python package that just "does this", I'd love to hear about 
it.  Either Az El, or X,Y,Z in ECI or ECF would do.