This project creates a battery-powered device which displays a red light if there is a Bay Area Spare the Air Day in effect, and a green light otherwise.
The project relies on the Bay Area Air Quality Management District's RSS Feed: https://www.baaqmd.gov/Feeds/AlertRSS.aspx. This RSS feed will give the description Alert in Effect during a Spare the Air Day, and No Alert otherwise.
The project is composed of two main scripts:
- a python script which runs on a server; and
- a C program which runs on a microcontroller.
The python script (fireplace.py) is run regularly at 3am and 3pm (via crontab) to pull the RSS feed. Depending on the content of the RSS feed, it writes a color (red or green) to a local file inside a web server directory.
The microcontroller periodically wakes and polls the web server to retrieve this file and sets its color based on the contents of the server's file.
To set details associated with your local environment (including email passwords, etc.), we store these details in a separate file called config.json that is ignored and therefore not stored in our Github repo.
When the fireplace.py script is run, it opens the config.json file and reads in the customized data.
Therefore, upon install, you should open the provided config-template.json file, update the details for your environment, and save the file as config.json in the top-level directory of this repository.