DEVLOG #6 - SCANNER HEALTH CHECKS IMPLEMENTED, IDENTIFY SCANNERS VIA MAC, BADGE MANAGEMENT & OTA GROUNDWORK SET

Website: https://spottr.brunogg.in

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Work Done:

1. Built an active scanner health-check system - pi-bridge pings each scanner every 15s over MQTT, scanner replies with a pong, and a missed pong marks it offline within a few seconds.
   This replaced the old passive system where the scanner sent a heartbeat every 30 seconds to update its status
2. Switched scanner identity to its MAC Address. with the pi-bridge verifying each scanner’s MAC and registering unknown scanners into Firebase as unassigned
3. Refactored pi-bridge from one single large file into multiple sub-files (config.py, handlers.py, health.py, presence.py, registry.py, state.py and main.py)
4. Started work on the Badges Management Page where the admin can add, edit, delete or enable/disable badges, where each row shows the live status of each badge asonline/offline and current room, along with confirmation dialog boxes for destructive actions like deletion or disabling badges
5. Laid the groundwork for OTA firmware updates for the scanner nodes, where I switched the scanner partition table to support two app slots, added semantic version tracking and comparison, and wrote the OTA update function (yet to be implemented properly)

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Future Work

1. Fully implement the OTA function where the pi-bridge triggers the update by publishing the new firmware version over MQTT and automatically flash it to the scanners
2. Add a captive portal where the scanners can be configured (Adding WiFi and Scanner IDs) without editing the code
3. Build the Scanners Management page to assign rooms to auto-registered scanners and Logs Page to view history of every action performed