The node pico engine includes a UI consisting of two web pages,

1. the My Picos page which lets you see a visual representation of your picos, including their parent/child relationships and subscriptions
2. the Engine Rulesets which lets you see the list of rulesets registered with the engine

Although you can use the pico engine directly* from your own applications, you may find these UI pages useful to get things set up, and to have an independent view of the state of your application's picos.

Assuming your pico engine is running on localhost port 8080, the two pages are located, respectively, at

1. http://localhost:8080/index.html
2. http://localhost:8080/ruleset.html


Using the pico engine through the UI

Pico Engine UI -- My Picos page

Pico Engine UI -- Engine Rulesets page

Pico Engine UI -- Subscriptions tab

*Using the pico engine directly

You can make requests to your engine over HTTP (using curl in a linux shell, or Postman, or a browser location bar). For example,

http://localhost:8080/api/engine-version will allow you to know which version of the pico engine you are running. For example,  {"version":"0.7.2"}

http://localhost:8080/api/owner-eci will give you the secret event channel identifier (ECI) for your owner pico, so that you can begin interacting with it programmatically. For example, {"eci":"cj12o992p0001lnddcx1owv2s"}

The pico engine installs two rulesets in the owner pico : io.picolabs.pico and io.picolabs.visual_params. The first of these is required in every pico. The second is expected by the UI to be installed in every pico.

Requests like http://localhost:8080/api/ruleset/register?url=<URL to raw KRL ruleset source code> can be used to register your own rulesets with the engine.

To install one of your registered rulesets in a pico, make a request like http://localhost:8080/sky/event/<ECI>/<EID>/pico/new_ruleset?rid=<RID> including an ECI for the pico, an event identifier (EID) or your choice, and the ruleset identifier (RID) of your ruleset.

Once you have an ECI for your pico, and have given it rulesets, you can send it other events and queries.