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Raspberry Pi Temperature Logger Using gspread

This is a set of instructions for a temperature logger using the Raspberry Pi.  It uses gspread, a python library to take data from the temperature probe and report it out to a google spreadsheet.  I found this to be incredibly helpful, and an easy way to log lots of information in a place that is easy to access and easy to download.

 

This is good for now, but the next step is to build a client website that will start and stop the temperature probe, open and title a new spreadsheet, and display the current temperature as well as a graph of the temperature over time.  I think that should be pretty straightforward, but its all things I don't know how to do.  It just seems to me like it is something I can learn to do, which is why I love this stuff overall.

 

Enjoy!

mikedavis
  • in reply to jimbowrey

    This is quite an old post that you are responding to, dated 2014. Might want to at-mention   to get their attention.

    It looks like gspread is still being maintained but the setup.py installer is no longer included and hence why you are getting the error message.

    Might want to try the using the pip package installer  

    https://pypi.org/project/gspread/ 

    image

    More info on using pip here:

    https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/tutorials/installing-packages/#use-pip-for-installing

  • Mike, Thanks for the instructions and the links to the Github files.  I am having some problems as I can not git gspread to load.  When executing the  the "sudo python setup.py install" I get an error message that setup.py can not be found.  I would like to know if this sensor to google sheets is still viable and how to proceed.  I would like to know the version of raspberry os to use and any other add ins needed.

    Thanks, Jim

  • in reply to Former Member

    Hey, this looks really good.  I would like to implement it for a training I am doing soon.  Would you have a link to your python code?  I am not very good at coding yet, so I always have to start from someone else's example and go from there.  Thanks!

  • in reply to mikedavis

    When I find some time I'm hoping to put together a blog post of the project, but my python code is somewhat similar to temp,py, except (1) I have a try/except statement for the gspread.login command where if it tries to log in and if it fails, it'll just log an error message and (2) There is no infinite loop, it tries to log the data only once.

     

    I originally had an infinite loop with time.sleep since I had hoped if gspread had failed to log in, it would just log the error and keep going. However, I notice sometimes that gspread got hung up on an infinite loop, so the try/except statement didn't work because it was still waiting on gspread to succeed or fail in logging in.

     

    So instead, you can use Crontab as follows:

     

        (1) in the command line, type:

     

                                  sudo crontab -e

     

        (2) Crontab provides a description of the format to put in the file. If you want to run the program when your pi boots, which I did so I could tell that it successfully worked right after I turned on the program, you can type:

     

                                  @reboot /bin/sleep 10 ; python /home/pi/subdirectory/temp.py &

     

    The sleep portion is to ensure that the pi is fully loaded and connected before trying to run the program. Then the second portion is the command to run the program.

     

       (3) In Crontab, you schedule what time you want the program to execute. The first value is minutes and I wanted this program to run every five minutes, so I typed in:

     

                                  0 * * * * python /home/pi/subdirectory/temp.py

                                  5 * * * * python /home/pi/subdirectory/temp.py

     

    and so on to account for every five minutes in an hour. You can schedule minutes, hours, days, or only certain dates if you want.

     

         (4) I was concerned about attempting to run the program if it was already stuck in an infinite loop due to gspread. This concern may be unfounded, but I also gave crontab a command to kill the program (which will only work if its running) one minute before trying to run it again. So my resulting code looked like:

     

                                  @reboot /bin/sleep 10 ; python /home/pi/lager/temp.py &

     

                            59 * * * * pkill /home/pi/lager/temp.py

                                  0 * * * * python /home/pi/lager/temp.py

     

                                  4 * * * * pkill /home/pi/lager/temp.py

                                  5 * * * * python /home/pi/lager/temp.py

     

    And so on and so forth. I am hoping that this would completely get rid of any infinite loops gspread may cause. So far this has worked great. In a 24 hour period it may have only missed 2 or 3 measurements, which for my purposes is not a big deal. Hope this helps!

  • in reply to Former Member

    I am glad that worked for you Charles!  Can you share how put gspread in cron?  I think that is a really elegant solution.  I had repeated problems of missing measurements, and I would like to use it for other things more reliably.  Thank you!