de | en

pdr/pdx

pdr (personal data recorder) and pdx (personal data expert) are free applications to collect and evaluate mostly numeric personal data.

The intended use case is to log individual medical data (blood sugar, blood pressure, body temperature, weight, heart rate and also medication). But you can use the programs also for technical, sports, fitness, weather, environmental or financial data. The principle is a continuous flow of numbers in time that you want to monitor. Every data item can also be commented by text.

Features

  • universal, unspecialized, multi purpose approach
  • open and transparent database (SQLite or MySQL)
  • no limitations in number or purpose of data collections
  • robust and transaction based
  • wide and extensible range of data sources
    • command line
    • Twitter, Identi.ca1
    • e-mail (POP3, IMAP)1
    • CSV
    • XML (intended for measurement devices or other software applications)
  • highly configurable outputs
    • static reports in any text format
      (HTML, XML, LATEX, RTF, ASCII, CSV ...)
    • diagrams in SVG, EPS, FIG and PNG
    • spline algorithm
  • Lisp-like programming language for statistical data evaluation
  • interactive modes for database queries and manipulation, report development and testing
  • scriptable (no GUI)
  • portable, open C++ sources
1 this allows mobile phones for very flexible data input 		This is the news feed of the project. Here you can always read the latest news from the developement.

Screen Shots

pdr und pdx are command line applications. The image shows a typical session in which pdr retrieves data from a mailbox being processed later by pdx.

session


Here is a complete HTML report generated from real data. Click on the image to get the entire HTML page.

report

This report demonstrates almost all features of the pdx data evaluation capabilities including tables, the computation of values and several types of diagrams. Every diagram is defined by just a handfull lines in the pdx programming language. The report template was made by a HTML editor and enriched later by pdx functions in the cells of the tables.

Here's another snapshot of a report. This one has been made in LATEX containing SVG images.

pdr in it's interactive mode

 pdx in it's interactive mode
pdr-i pdx-i

Note: the user's inputs have later been colored red

The User

The user is intended to have some technical knowledge, an interest in participation and an imagination about his needs. This is because the applications are designed for general purpose and will not provide him anything by default - the user has to create the reports and diagrams himself. So, at first he should have some concrete ideas about what he wants to see. The user doesn't have to be an experienced programmer - the report language is simple - but he should know what programming is. He should be able to edit a text file and to run a program on the command line (a typical Linux user).

Documentation

pdr and pdx are well documented in German and English. Other recent documents are README, INSTALL, TODO and ChangeLog.

License

pdr and pdx are free software under the terms of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) as a so called Non-GNU project.

The applications are licensed by the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2 or later.

Supported Platforms

The pdr/pdx project does not use any platform specific things. The applications have been developped and tested on Arch Linux x86_64 but will truly run also on any other Linux out of the box. The needed libraries have also been ported to other operating systems. The pdr/pdx project also compiles and runs very well on Windows computers.

Releases and Downloads

First have a look into INSTALL to inform yourself about the requirements. These requirements are not part of the pdr/pdx project but free software, too.

The original sources of the project are hosted on Savannah in a public subversion repository. You can use your local subversion client directly to get (checkout) a local working copy.

Note: these local working copies will be read only: you can receive (update) changes and bugfixes from the repository but you cannot put back (commit) local changes into the repository. For doing this you must join the project as a known member and use svn over ssh having a private key and all the stuff.

The next steps to do after getting a local copy of the sources are described in INSTALL.
what?
 to find where? change log remarks
development sources 
svn co svn://svn.savannah.nongnu.org/pdrx/trunk
 here Normally the minor version number on the trunk is about one higher than the last stable release.

Note: sources on the trunk have always to be seen as alpha software. They should always compile without errors but they can be incomplete in functionality and still need more testing. Don't install binaries compiled from trunk sources for production purposes anywhere.
stable sources
 
svn co svn://svn.savannah.nongnu.org/pdrx/tags/1.8.0
download area		 here Stable sources will be tagged with their version number X.Y.Z
binary releases
 download area
Windows users normally don't have a compiler and are not used to compile applications. So I provide 32bit binaries for Windows in the hope that they will be useful. Just download and unzip the file. The resulting directory contains executable binaries called pdr.exe and pdx.exe, the documentation and the samples.

I will not provide binaries for other platforms at the moment.

Notes For Programmers

See this project as a framework. In this framework pdr and pdx are just premature infants of the idea behind. Almost every aspect around the database is extensible in some directions. I give some ideas:

Contact

I don't want a complicated registration ceremony here. But I would be pleased about any feedback about your goals, use cases and experiences with pdr and pdx. Send me a message.

Torsten Müller
Bern, Switzerland
e-mail to: pdrx [at] fastmail.fm

Last change: 2012-10-16