AX206 LCD: Grafana Dashboards & Simple Photo Service

This tool intends to be a mechanism for publishing grafana metrics to an AX206 display which has a resolution of 480x320.

Purchase here: https://www.amazon.com/Screen-Monitor-Computer-Temperature-Display/dp/B09TTHZYSH

Installation Requirements

requirements.txt

Ensure you've setup a local venv environment after pulling down the source code:

python3 -m venv .
source bin/activate
pip3 install -r requirements.txt

This will create a location where you can locally pip3 install all of the dependencies required to run this project, source the bin/activate script so you can install all of the modules locally.

Grafana

Before you begin, you need grafana installed on your system which can be installed via your systems package manager. You will need an authenticated account that can view the dashboards you create in grafana.

Please note that any grafana dashboards you create will be published to a 480x320 resolution LCD screen - this isn't a-lot of real-estate, sufficient for perhaps 2 rows of graphs and at most 4-5 columns of metrics (single digit metrics).

If you have an NVIDIA graphics card, I would recommend installing dcgm-exporter which publishes prometheus metrics regarding voltages, temperature and other statistics to a prometheus end-point on your system which can be then graphed.

This installation guide won't go into detail on the setup of grafana / prometheus or system metrics you might want to measure, but there's plenty of guides available for doing so, please review the appendix in this document for details on how to get grafana running on your system.

AX206 Image Server

The included AX206 image server provides a flask based API that allows any client the ability to send images over the usb bus to the LCD. The ax206-server.py script must be run as root in order to access the USB hardware directly.

sudo bash
source bin/activate
python3 ax206-server.py --port 8080

It is highly recommended that you wrap the script above using systemd /etc/systemd/system/ax206.service for example and run the process as root so it will be operational on system startup once enabled/started.

Once running there's a swagger interface to try it out:

http://localhost:5000/ by default if no port is specified, or as configured above http://localhost:8080/

The server will allow modification of the image shown on the display and changing the level of brightness between 0 - 7.

Grafana Image Puller

The script grafana-pull.py maintains the code necessary to authenticate with your local grafana server and pull dashboards down delaying 5 seconds between showing dashboards as listed in a configuration.

Configuration

Local to the script grafana-pull.py, the following configuration file must exist as grafana-pull.yaml. An example is below:

grafana:
  url: http://localhost:3000
  username: admin
  password: admin

  dashboards:
    - path: /d/Oxed_c6Wz/nvidia-dcgm-exporter-dashboard?orgId=1&from=now-30m&to=now
      crop_top: 135
    - path: /d/c2fb5419-2842-441d-a109-2677acdb8ba7/system-sensor-data?orgId=1&from=now-30m&to=now
      crop_top: 130
ax206:
  url: http://127.0.0.1:5000/upload

Most of the elements are self-explanatory, the crop_top allows you to trim off the top of the dashboard that maintains the menu system from grafana so more real-estate is available to the LCD screen.

Photo frame

Contained wtihin is a photoframe, you will manually need to change the script to point at the location you'd like the photos to be sent from. Photos are resized and sent to the ax206 server above.

DISCLAIMER

The software is provided "as is", without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including but not limited to the warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and noninfringement. In no event shall the authors or copyright holders be liable for any claim, damages, or other liability, whether in an action of contract, tort, or otherwise, arising from, out of, or in c onnection with the software or the use or other dealings in the software.