Sensor Simulator

The sensor simulator is geared at testing the total infrastructure and takes short cuts on the event formats sent. Currently, it primarily generates event records starting with an optional event identifier, followed by an optional timestamp, and a payload of random integer values.

sensor [options]
--host=<host name>, default=localhost
--port=<portnr>, default=50500
--sensor=<name>
--protocol=<name> udp or tcp(default)
--increment=<number>, default=1
--timestamp, default=on
--columns=<number>, default=1
--events=<events length>, (-1=forever,>0), default=1
--file=<data file>
--replay use file or standard input
--time=<column> where to find the exact time
--batch=<batchsize> , default=1
--delay=<ticks> interbatch delay in ms, default=1
--trace=<trace> interaction
--server run as a server
--client run as a client

To generate a test file with 100 events for the example, you can rely mostly on the default settings. Hooking up the sensor to the stream engine merely requires an additional hostname and port instead of a file argument. A glimpse of the sensor interaction can be obtained using the 'debug' protocol, which writes the events to standard output, or a specific file. The status of the DataCell can be checked with datacell.dump(), which now shows a hundred events gathered in the basket bsktin. sensor simulator asks for user input before it exits. This way, the receiving side can pick up the events and not be confronted with a broken UDP channel.

$ sensor --events=100 --protocol=debug --columns=3
1,306478,1804289383
... 98 more ...
100,137483,1956297539
$ sensor --host=localhost --port=50500 --events=100 --columns=3