Looper

Copyright © Akos Polster. All rights reserved.

Loops info on a Raspberry Pi equipped with the Unicorn Hat HD:

• Current date
• Current time
• Current weather
• A panda or a chicken
• Current holiday, if any
• Latest news headlines from Reuters
• Phase of the moon

Installation

Installing Dependencies

1. Install the Unicorn Hat HD software according to https://github.com/pimoroni/unicorn-hat-hd

2. Then install these extra packages:

   pip3 install Pillow
   pip3 install requests
   pip3 install holidays
   pip3 install feedparser
   pip3 install PyYAML
   pip3 install pyowm
   pip3 install pygame
   pip3 install ip2geotools
   pip3 install chest
   pip3 install astral
   pip3 install tzlocal

Installing Looper

Run sudo make from this directory. Then run looper from the command line.

To run Looper when the system boots, add this line to /etc/rc.local:

nohup /usr/local/bin/looper &

Configuration

Configure looper by editing it's configuration file. The system configuration file is /usr/local/lib/looper/looper.yaml, the user configuration file is ~/.looper.yaml.

If present, the user configuration file is used, otherwise the system configuration file.

Configuring OpenWeatherMap

Looper is using OpenWeatherMap to display the current weather. OpenWeatherMap requires an API key that can be requested at https://openweathermap.org/api. After receiving the key, add it to ~/.looper.yaml:

owm:
    key: "my-api-key"

Developing on the Mac

• Install Homebrew

• Install the rest of the dependencies:

  brew install python3
  brew install sdl2
  pip3 install Pillow
  pip3 install requests
  pip3 install holidays
  pip3 install feedparser
  pip3 install PyYAML
  pip3 install pyowm
  pip3 install pygame==2.0.0.dev6
  pip3 install ip2geotools
  pip3 install chest
  pip3 install astral
  pip3 install tzlocal