Showing Students When And Where They Need To Be At The Turing School Using @Raspberry_Pi #piday #raspberrypi
Regis Boudinot combines IoT, C, Python, Rails, NodeJS, Linux, a VPS, API’s, Webhooks, four Arduino Yuns, and a Raspberry Pi to help students see where they needed to be and when at the Turing School. via medium.com
A personal project at the Turing School of Software and Design
It all started with a simple idea. Output relevant data to an LCD screen based on the information found on a website to inform students where they need to be.
At turing there are four classrooms. Classroom A, B, C, and the Big Workspace. All students can check a website that we all call “today” (today.turing.io) and figure out where they need to be.
Sometime “today” gets updated at the last minute, or multiple times throughout the day.
In Module 3 (The third module of four), we have a 2 week sprint to work on a personal project that involves a certain level of complexity. I decided to use an Arduino Yun (a wifi ready Arduino with a tiny linux computer and a microcontroller) and output which cohort/teacher need to be in a certain classroom at 9:00AM.
The Challenge
First came the true test, how do I scrape the webpage?
The answer was simple at first. I decided to use nokogiri (a ruby tool that scrapes websites and pulls down the information for parsing) and some ruby logic. Turns out that “today” has no divs. This means I have no way of finding the parent, children, or sibling elements. I essentially had to build order out of chaos.
Once the I was able to make some order out of this data, I then had to organize/reject the data based on what kind of information it contained. This proved to be strange. I had to program ruby in a functional way for this to work. Having a functional rails app is a new concept to me and I find it to be awesome.
I then moved on to creating tables for each classroom, creating API endpoints that serve JSON and XML, and pushing my app to Digital Ocean.
Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!