Project for gathering data, storing them on rpi and sending regularly with email.

I had to gather data from the internet regularly for a longer period of time. Since I had a RPi I decided to use it. But since I wanted the whole process automated and reusable I decided to separate the reporting part from the gathering. And that's why I created this project.

In order to use it, you need: a) raspberry pi connected to the internet b) a gmail account (however after small modifications any email account will do) c) some script for gathering data

It:

1. Gathers data in the regular intervals and saves them into separate, datetime-tagged files.
2. After specified time zips the data and sends them to your e-mail
3. Creates new directory and goes back to 1.
4. If some kind of error occurs it also sends you an e-mail and retries to do the job.

There is a dummy data gathering script in this project, which collects weather data from http://apidev.accuweather.com.

Before you start, put the credentials for your gmail account into credentials.txt with the following format:

user:email1:password recipient:email2

In order to run the scripy just type:

python main.py 60 300

60 means, that you will gather data every 60 seconds. 300 means, that you will send an e-mail report every 300 seconds

If you don't want the process to be killed after closing shell:

sudo nohup python main.py &

Functionalities of these scripts could easily be achieved with cronjob. I haven't used it since: a) I am more familiar with doing it in python b) I like to have everything in the script c) I suppose error handling is easier this way.