Tag: Luci

Hi,

I spent the last weeks mainly developing the LuCI Application for VRConfig. As soon as you want to do advanced things with LuCI, it gets cumbersome.
As the API is mostly undocumented, you have to dig through the LuCI’s source code trying out functions which could be useful according to their name.
It’s a bit of a trial and error game.
Currently the LuCI app does the following.
It displays an image of the router and parses the JSON file, which contains the locations of the components.
With this information it can mark the associated physical ports to the currently selected network interface and display those network ports, which are connected to a cable. You can also hover over the components and click on them, which leads you to their respective settings page.

I also improved the annotation app. It now lets you choose the router name from a list of all currently supported router models of OpenWrt. I got that list with a series of grep and sed commands from the OpenWrt git repository.
For your information, there are currently around 1100 different router models supported. 🙂

In the next weeks I will polish the LuCI Application and try to integrate VRConfig into the openwrt build system to be able to select the correct router image and JSON file at build time.

Hi,

I have some quick updates about VRConfig for you.
Short recap: VRConfig aims to introduce a graphical configuration mode for OpenWrt’s Webinterface LuCI.
For that need to collect pictures of the backside of all supported routers. The idea is to do this in a crowdsourcing manner. The community can submit pictures of their routers together with a metadata file which contains the locations of the components on the picture.

I spent the last weeks developing a web application to provide the annotation functionality of the router components.
A working prototype is now ready and can be tested at the following URL: https://vrconfig.gitlab.io/annotator/
Source code: https://gitlab.com/vrconfig/annotator

The annotator produces a JSON file which in turn can be parsed by the LuCI Application to provide the graphical configuration mode.

The LuCI application is being developed right now and will be provided shorty under the following URL: https://gitlab.com/vrconfig/luci-app-vrconfig

More info about that in the next blog post.

Hi,

I am Tobias, a Computer Science student at the TU-Berlin. This is my second time participating in GSoC for Freifunk.
I am excited about this project as it helps to reduce the entry barrier for inexperienced users of OpenWrt and its web interface LuCI.

When you look at the current LuCI Webinterface you will notice that it looks fairly decent, especially with the Material Theme.
However for an inexperienced user without a technical background it surely looks scary. All the text full of technical terms with few pictures can look like a book with seven seals.

This project aims to introduce a graphical configuration mode.
To make the configuration interface more connected to the actual router the user owns, we want to display an image of the backside of the ports in the web interface.
The user shall be able to interact with this graphical representation of the router by hovering and clicking on the different parts like LAN ports, antenna etc.

What are the necessary steps to archive this goal?

First, we need pictures of the backside of all the different router models. Here the idea is to collect them via crowdsourcing by the community. Everyone can take a picture of their router and upload it to a Git repository. Also, the location of of the router components must be marked on every picture. For that I will develop a small application which allows the user to annotate a router picture and generates a metadata file.
Second, the annotated pictures need to be integrated into the OpenWrt buildsystem.
Third, a LuCI application needs to be developed to display the result as an interactive graphic in the web interface.

In the next blog post I will go into more detail on the individual steps as well as update you about the progress.