A Django web application to display information about the battery and WiFi networks of an Ubuntu (12.04+) machine (Tested on Ubuntu 13.10).

iwlist needs to use sudo to scan WiFi networks properly. While the project can detect if sudo can be used without asking the user for a password and will only use it if it is avaiable, using iwlist without sudo will not give proper results.

You can either add iwlist to /etc/sudoers to whitelist it, and run Django development server with no root privileges:

python manage.py runserver

Or without whitelisting it, you can run Django development server process with root privileges so any subprocess it runs will inherit its privileges:

sudo python manage.py runserver

Of course this is only suitable for a development environment.

After that, access the pages on:

127.0.0.1:8000/wifi
127.0.0.1:8000/battery

The project contains tests for most of its functionality, to run the tests:

python manage.py test

The project follows the typical Django projects/apps structure, all the backend functionality is coded in BatteryWifiMonitor app files, the most important files are:

• BatteryWifiMonitor\utils.py: This is where the app talks with Ubuntu; it runs the subprocesses that scan WiFi networks and get battery status. This code also detect if sudo can be used.
• BatteryWifiMonitor\api.py: This file converts the various information to a JSON format, to be used by jQuery/AJAX calls.
• BatteryWifiMonitor\tests.py: Test cases for the application functions.
• BatteryWifiMonitor\views.py: The application has two views to render the initial HTML pages with the requested information, and another two views that return JSON responses to be used by the subsequent AJAX calls to update the pages.

• HTML Templates: The templates (BatteryWifiMonitor\templates\) use Django's template inheritance to avoid repetition of HTML and to load only the needed Javascript code for each task. The battery meter uses a pure CSS solution rather than an HTML5 meter element for backward browser compatibility.
• Javascript: BatteryWifiMonitor\static\js\wifi.js and BatteryWifiMonitor\static\js\battery.js conatin the jQuery code that gets the initial JSON and the subsequent updates JSON and display the data in WiFi and battery pages, respectively.
• CSS: base.html uses one CSS file, BatteryWifiMonitor\static\css\style.css.

• Python 2.7
• Django 1.6
• jQuery 1.11 (included)

There's no need to run under virtualenv since the only package used is Django which is most likely already installed on your machine.

The project uses the following Linux commands:

• General: sudo, true.
• WiFi scanning: iwlist.
• Battery status: acpi (this is the most robust and portable tool to get battery status).
• Tests: seq, echo.