Raspberry Pi Temperature Logger Using gspread

Thank you @Mike Davis. I am using an Arduino to control the temperature of a tub of water via a fish tank heater (going to lager me some beer this winter!!) and this document helped me take data I was pulling from Arduino onto the Raspberry Pi and get onto gspread. Works great! The only comment I would make is that gspread may be best initiated by using cron on the raspberry pi. I was using it in an infinite loop, but occasionally and at random times, the gspread login function would cause my code to get stuck and not do anything until I used CTRL-C. Using cron and scheduling the code to execute every five minutes, it only missed measurements once or twice in a 24 hour period.Thank you!

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!

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!

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!

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!