Day 1, 2 and 3
For the first three days of week 3 my focus was on configuring the NightScout website that I am using to continually track the values from my CGM (continuous glucose monitor) and store them in the cloud. The deployment that I used can be found here, and it is the configuration for the CGM that I am using. To use NightScout, you must first set up a website using the instructions on Github, and you can find that through the link that I provided above. At first it seemed as though I was going to be using an Azure deployment, which is just Microsoft’s method of deploying apps to the internet, however I found that Azure was quite complicated to use and set up. I found that it was much easier to use the Heroku deployment method. All of the information about deployment of the app can be found on the NightScout website. Your NightScout app also has to be connected to a database in the cloud, and using the Heroku deployment method automatically sets one up for you, so I found that to be much easier. Heroku automatically deploys the app and gives you a website URL that you can use to see your app. Here is a screenshot of what mine looks like:
The next obstacle that I had to overcome was how exactly I was going to upload the data from my CGM to my app.
Day 4 and 5
For this project to work, I have to be able to access the data from my CGM via the cloud. To get the data into the cloud was a daunting task in itself. The NightScout app requires that you upload using an Android device. You can download the NightScout Android app from their website, just make sure that it is the app that is configured for the CGM that you are using (yes, I downloaded the wrong one and it would not work for nearly a whole day). Once the app is downloaded I had to go into the settings and connect it to my cloud database that I had set up. The nice thing about their Android app is that you have the option to auto-configure using a QR scanner. All I had to do was enter my URL and API Secret that I had set up during the Heroku deployment, and then scan it using the Android phone that I have. Once that was set up, the data from my app was being sent to the database in the cloud. The next step for my project will be figuring out how I can access that data in the cloud and use it to run a program that I will create on the Raspberry Pi.
