Flask Finder

Inventory search for laboratories, developed for use in a large R1 state university teaching lab. Intended to be used as a search kiosk on a raspberry pi. Includes toggles for searching chemicals, stock, and equipment separately. Written using flask, pandas, and sqlite3. Can be hosted locally or on the web.

Preparation

If installing on a fresh pi, open a terminal and enter sudo apt-get install python3-scipy && pip install flask, then go get a coffee because that'll take a while.
Fill in inventories in the .csv files in /db (more verbose instructions located in the /db folder), then run the update_all.sh script to fill sqlite database. No knowledge of SQL needed!

Use

1. Open a terminal session in the folder where the program has been downloaded
2. Enter python3 flask_finder.py
3. Open the web browser and point it at the address flask runs the web app on (typically 127.0.0.1:5000).

Location Diagrams

This software supports showing images of the laboratory upon mousing over the location entry in the results table. For more information, see the readme in static/location_diagrams.

Usage Statistics

Data about usage is stored in /log/log.db. Usage reports can currently be generated by calling generate_report.py, this functionality may eventually be added to the web interface.

Most searched terms for the month:

Hex map of average use times per weekday

TODO:

• Add logging of queries
• use R Python with seaborn to generate monthly reports of search terms and times
• Integrate use reporting to web interface