I apologize if these questions have already been answered before, but my lab is working on connecting some of our very remote sensorgnomes to wifi for both automatic data uploads and for remote monitoring of the station (looking at the web UI remotely, if possible). I am able to connect the sensorgnome to my wifi on the web UI, however I am unable to login to Motus (I get an error saying “bad user/pass” even though the username and password are correct) and I’m unsure how the process of automatic uploads and remote monitoring works. My two main questions are:
The Sensorgnome V2 User Guide’s “Internet Configuration” page explains that the baseline option is for the SG to obtain a token from a Sensorgnome server and upload the data as user sg-uploader into Motus project 460. This works without logging into Motus on the web UI. How exactly do you ensure that data is being uploaded to Motus? Is the deployment timeline updated hourly on the registered receiver on your project? Also, it looks like Motus authentication is a known issue – is there any tips for connecting to Motus on the web UI?
How do we go about monitoring these stations remotely? Is there a way to access the web UI remotely, or if not, what kind of information can we monitor remotely? I’ve seen previous posts mention using the SGHub Thorsten put together at http://www.sensorgnome.net/, but when I try to access this page it requires a username and password, and I’m not sure what that would be or what process I should go through to obtain access to it.
Hi Lauren, I’m not sure I understand what you are trying to do when you write “I am unable to login to Motus”. Are you visiting https://motus.org? When you’re dealing with the Sensorgnome you should not need the Motus username/password.
In terms of monitoring the uploads, you can use the SG’s web UI (the files tab tells you what is going on), or https://www.sensorgnome.net. There are developments to send you an email alert when the Motus back-end ceases to receive data but I don’t know where that is at. The SG Hub also could do that but I don’t want to duplicate things.
If your SG is connected to the internet it will show up on the SG Hub (https://www.sensorgnome.net). It has had a monitoring data outage due to disk space issues and me being sick but that’s now fixed and I’m in the process of moving everything to a new server today. This will change the authentication to use your Motus login instead of a special username/password which I’ve been sending users in the past.
Thank you for your quick response, I really appreciate it. When I mentioned I was unable to login to Motus, I was referring to logging in on the sensorgnome web UI via the wifi hotspot. On the Sensorgnome V2 User Guide, it mentions 3 ways to perform the automatic data uploads using wifi and option 3 was “enter your Motus creds” under the Files Tab. I had tried this and received the error “bad user/pass”. Sorry for the confusion. Do you know if this error has occurred for anyone else? I know that logging into Motus isn’t necessary for automatic uploads, so I won’t worry about that for now.
Thank you for sharing the monitoring link, it’s letting me access it now. I appreciate the updates regarding the email alerts and the change in authentication. The email alerts would super handy because our lab maintains 30+ Motus stations. I see now that the Last Upload and Upload Result on the Files page would give me all the information I need for monitoring.
The sensorgnome I am testing this on is SG-C40ERPI3C7E6, which I just registered as a test station under our project. We are planning on doing wifi access for two stations in Mexico this week (I’m not sure which SG-IDs yet).
I have a question about remote access. The link you provided only allows me to remotely view the local web UI when I am on the same wifi as the sensorgnome. Is there a way for me to view the local web UI remotely, or is that feature only available when you are in range of the sensorgnome?
The local web ui on the Sensorgnome can be reached from anywhere you can reach the sensorgnome… So if you connect to the local hotspot you can get to it. If your Sensorgnome is on a LAN (via wifi or ethernet) then you can generally get to it as well while on the LAN with your phone or laptop.
Once you’re outside of your LAN there currently is nothing built into the SG software suite to provide access, it’s like accessing any other machine on the LAN from remote.
I have started to install the Tailscale VPN client in recent dev builds and I have been using it myself to work on remote SGs that others are running (this is to work on cellular problems that can only be tested in specific locations) and I like it a lot. I’m planning on implementing something via the SG Hub web site, but that’s not going to happen tomorrow…
Currently in order to use the Tailscale VPN you have to install their client on your laptop/desktop/phone and either sign-up yourself or contact me. I’m currently running an open-source version of Tailscale and one hurdle is that I need to implement access control such that each user can only see their own SGs. Right now there are only a small number of users that can access all SGs (well, each SG still has its own password, so it’s not really free-for-all).
The installation of the Tailscale client on a laptop or so is quite easy, but VPNs can get tricky, e.g., if you’re using a VPN yourself for other purposes, etc.