LOBOViz CGI Data Service
The LOBOViz server has a public CGI (Common Gateway Interface) that allows remote clients to request and receive LOBO sensor data via HTTP (Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol). This page describes how to access the CGI and retrieve sensor data.
CGI URL
The LOBOViz data CGI for this server is published at the following URL:
- http://columbia.loboviz.com/cgi-bin/nph-data.cgi
CGI Data Query Parameters
Parameters are appended to the URL after a '?' character and are each is subsequently separated by a '&' character.
The following parameters are supported:
| Parameter | Description |
|---|---|
| min_date | first day of data query in format [YYYYMMDD] |
| max_date | last day of data query in format [YYYYMMDD] |
| y | comma-separated list of measurement names for dependent variable(s) |
| data_format | required to be 'text' for text output |
The following measurement names are supported for the 'y=' independent variable list:
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| cdom | colored dissolved organic matter [QSDE] |
| conductivity | conductivity [S/m] |
| oxygen | dissolved oxygen [ml/l] |
| fluorescence | fluorescence [micro g/l] |
| nitrate | nitrate concentration [micro M] |
| oxygen_sat | oxygen saturation [ml/l] |
| oxygen_percent | oxygen % saturation [%] |
| voltage | power supply voltage [V] |
| salinity | salinity |
| scattering | scattering coeff [1/m*sr] |
| temperature | water temperature [C] |
| turbidity | turbidity [NTU] |
CGI Data Result Format
The data are returned as tab-separated text representations of numeric values. The first line of the returned data is a header of tab separated names and units for each data column. Each subsequent line displays local (PST) date/time in format [YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss], followed by a numeric value for each requested measurement, all fields separated by tabs.
Example
For example, if you want to retrieve nitrate and salinity for September 29, 2008 the URL would be:
Click the above URL to see the tab-separated text data returned by the server.
Scripted Usage
Any programming language with HTTP support can be used to directly access the LOBO data CGI and process the returned sensor measurements. Alternately, HTTP utilities such as wget or cURL can be invoked to retrieve the data and save to local file for later processing.
