Working through the pain.

I seem to be on the road to recovery. I had been optimistic, hoping to be back on my feet this weekend. Probably not, though still maybe? Anyway I have been plugging away at Mantilogs and my little buddy Jake(He's like a control panel for the office + dashboard + light) has been getting some work done.

I added a metadata section to the Leopard Gecko main page, this isn't exactly necessary but I felt it needed something there. Of course everything still needs a proper design pass, I am not particularly skilled in web design however so have not made a proper design pass. I do plan to sit down and learn how the design process works and how to make something that looks nice but so far I only really care that things are functional.

As you can see the poor lizards have not had tank cleaning or enrichment in a while. I feel pretty bad for them, this should be rectified this coming week. There were some rather annoying roadblocks in the way that FINALLY seem to be clearing. I wont go into detail but yeah... really looking forward to getting things cleaned.

As for Jake I tore out the old JSON based backup functionality as I now have a more reliable DB server. He's all DB backed now using SQLAlchemy and PostgreSQL I didn't want to use Django here and opted for Flask as this runs on a Pi Zero W. He keeps track of current weather data and forecasts so I don't have to. This data could be useful for Mantilogs cross-referencing as well. Who knows what kind of effect barometric pressure has on leopard geckos? I don't. But I will!

I also began the laborious process of overhauling the UI (yay, more design) for the control panel. The old version was made over a weekend and I didn't really care how it looked. It was mostly just me messing around with fonts and bootstrap at the time. So I've begun stripping out the bootstrap where I can, replacing it with Bulma which I do quite prefer as it's lighter and out of the way. I've realized I prefer things that give me more of a framework or set of tools/components I can use as I see fit compared to massive, bloated, overengineered things I may only ever use a small bit of.

I really do wonder if I would rather just make my own game engine. If only to learn better how they all work under the hood. This is of course assuming that I choose to stick with game dev at the end of all this. I could also end up doing it in my off time, who knows? I try not to plan too much if I can avoid it as plans always get changed. I just pick a project and work from there, you gotta be flexible because I mean... who knows what's going to happen next?

Anyway Jake went from

To

The first shot isn't exactly representative of the old way he looked, as I had to rip out some stuff when I changed the way the code on the backend worked. He's now serving a pair of APIs and the CP consumes them via JS to display the data. Of course I need to make a design pass on this but it's functioning now as a portal I can use to get around some parts of my network.

I want to expand fucntionality, though I will do this at a later time. For now I just want to make sure the portal is stable while I work on some other stuff. I need to get my hands on some ESP32s for a better monitoring system on the gecko tanks, now that I have worked out how that will all go. It would be nice if I had the funds to just get what I needed when I needed, but hey, that's why we gotta be creative around here.

Anyway, rather be doing stuff right now than writing about it. Gonna go figure out what I should start on next.

Cheers.