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CONSUMERS.md

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Creating Signal K Consumers

  1. Introduction

A Consumer is any program, web application, website or device that Consumes a Signal K server's WebSocket stream, and does something with it without affecting the server or the stream*

( There are some use cases where a Consumer should be able to change the stream. Currently, in such a case I recommend building a Provider, which doubles as a Consumer.)*

  1. Sample consumers

There are several prototype level browser based consumers available. You can install them with bower and when you access the node server's root with your browser you will get a list of installed consumers.

Bower is a package manager for web page components (Javascript, html and css files). With it you can pull in HTML5 applications from the net, place them under your Signal K server's root directory and access them via http.

git clone https://github.com/SignalK/signalk-server-node
cd signalk-server-node/
npm install
npm install bower
node_modules/.bin/bower install https://github.com/SignalK/instrumentpanel.git
node_modules/.bin/bower install https://github.com/SignalK/sailgauge.git
bin/n2k-from-file

After that the two installed consumers are available at http://localhost:3000/sailgauge/ and http://localhost:3000/instrumentpanel/ .

  1. Getting started with your own consumers

The simplest form of a consumer is a process or web page that receives and displays the data in some way. The server contains a very simple web page that connects to the server with a WebSocket connection and updates the display as new json messages are received from the server. If you have installed the server and started it with one of the file-based startup scripts in the bin/ directory you can access it at http://localhost:3000/examples/consumer-example.html. The html code of the web page is in the examples directory.

  1. Going further

Have an idea for a great way to visualise Signal K data? Something bugging you about the sample consumers? Learn about the message formats, share your input, write some code, join the mailing list!