Code and docs for Kneebone Studio power switcher project

Obtain Texas utility customer outage data from https://poweroutage.us/area/utility/380, and turn off a relay if outages exceed a threshold.

bs.py -- run this periodically to get power outage data, for example in a crontab:

# m h  dom mon dow   command
*/5 * * * * python3 /home/pi/gith/powerscraper/bs.py >> ~/scraperlog 2>&1

bs.py generates three lines of output per invocation: a comma-separated list of counties, a comma-separated list of outage counts per county, and a line with timestamps (epoch seconds, date, time), the string "Utility Outages:" followed by the number of outages across all counties.

demo.py -- Actual live demo, reads total outage data from URL above, and turns on a raspberry Pi GPIO.1 (physical pin 12) to trigger power cut relay depending on the number of outages. Works on Python 2.7 currently standard on Rpi. demo.py takes one argument: an integer threshold value. Outage data is checked every five minutes repeatedly: power is disconnected if the number of outages is above the threshold and reconnected when below.

canned-demo.py -- run this to read data from scraperlog text file; run gunzip scraperlog.gz to uncompress the data. If not running on a Raspberry Pi with GPIO support, use a command-line option like --dry-run to ignore the hardware. Works on Python 2 and Python 3.

TODO: process-csv.py: read a text scraper log generated by bs.py and generate a pandas-compatible .csv file.