OpenEIT Dashboard as a Portable Application

The openeit dashboard can be run through the OpenEIT repository by installing the python dependencies, but this requires some effort. To make it easy to get started, this portable python application is a desktop app with a simple DMG installer. This means users can simply double click to install a fully working time series/spectroscopy and EIT reconstruction tool kit.

Right now, we have a DMG for OSX. If this becomes more popular and there are requests, we may consider doing it for other operating systems.

Run the npm installation:

npm install

On Linux / OS X clean caches, very important!!!!!

rm -rf ~/.node-gyp
rm -rf ~/.electron-gyp
rm -rf ./node_modules

# On Window PowerShell (not cmd.exe!!!)
# clean caches, very important!!!!!
Remove-Item "$($env:USERPROFILE)\.node-gyp" -Force -Recurse -ErrorAction Ignore
Remove-Item "$($env:USERPROFILE)\.electron-gyp" -Force -Recurse -ErrorAction Ignore
Remove-Item .\node_modules -Force -Recurse -ErrorAction Ignore

Then to see if the electron app can run type the following from the root directory. The electron app should start. In this case it would be running from the unpackaged python, and is not yet packaged.

./node_modules/.bin/electron .

Package the python app:

Create a virtual environment then cd into the bin directory and activate it. i.e.

python -m venv virty
source activate

Install the right things in the virtual environment:

pip install -r "eit_dash/requirements.txt"

There should be a folder called pydistribution which contains the final packaged python app. This is a portable version of python with all module dependencies installed. It's large!

Final packaging it all together:

Now package it into an app by running:

electron-packager . --icon=icons/logo.icns --platform=darwin --arch=x64 --overwrite --prune=true

There should be a package contained in "OpenEIT-darwin-x64" which can be distributed and moved from machine to machine.

For extra points, create the installer. First you need to install it:

This article is helpful: https://www.electron.build/cli https://www.npmjs.com/package/electron-builder

sudo npm config set unsafe-perm=true

./node_modules/.bin/electron-builder --x64 --prepackaged OpenEIT-darwin-x64 dist

or:

./node_modules/.bin/build --prepackaged --projectDir  dist
DEBUG=electron-builder

./node_modules/.bin/electron-builder --x64 --prepackaged 

Now there should be a dmg contained in the dist folder, that can be installed on any machine.

Note on editing Visualization dashboard for OpenEIT:

Requirements

Python 3.6.1+

Install

pip -r requirements.txt

Run

python run.py

How to add more visualizations

Note: Visualization types are called modes. Each mode visualization lives in dashboard/components/modes.

To add your own mode visualization:

• Create a new file in dashboard/components/modes, for example my_mode.py.
• Create a new Dash layout. Example:

# dashboard/components/modes/my_mode.py

import dash_html_components as html

layout = html.Div([html.H3('Hello, world!')])

• Edit dashboard/components/modes/__init__.py and add information about the new mode. Example:

# dashboard/components/modes/__init__.py

...
from components.modes import my_mode

modes = [
    Mode(name='Time Series', layout=time_series.layout),
    Mode(name='Bioimpedance', layout=bioimpedance.layout),
    Mode(name='Spectroscopy', layout=spectroscopy.layout),
    Mode(name='Imaging', layout=imaging.layout),

    # Add your new mode info here
    Mode(name='My Mode', layout=my_mode.layout)
]

• That's it! Run the app and your new mode viz should appear in the dashboard, under its own navigation tab.

Contributors

• Jean Rintoul
• Marion Le Borgne