Programming

We mainly used node js in order to execute our interface. Python was used in order to have the time be mirrored from the configuration of the Raspberry Pi. In order to communicate from python to node js , we used a shell script reader under node js to interact with our python based module.

Node.js helped us out a lot since we used API’s in our calendar, weather, and our stock market modules. Node js gave us very little buffer time since our server that is node js based calls the API until there is a response. The only fault here could be is the that the host's API is outdated, we ran into that problem with our stock reader. We concluded that Yahoo Finance's API is the best in order to gather information. As for the weather, we used an opensource weather host called openweathermap.org. They released public and private API keys depending on the user's needs.

Node js also gave us seem less refreshing that’s how we were able to add certain animations like fades and being able to cycle through. We chose node js because we approached the project with asynchronous features, meaning that the projects features will be able to run independently. This was great since the time and date will appear in a place where the raspberry pi does not have a stable connection to the Wi-Fi.

The news/sports updates were gathered via RSS. We programmed an RSS reader that gets headlines every 20 mins. As for the updates for our stock and weather, they were configured differently. Since we used APIs we had a bit more freedom to customize it. Stocks are updated every 20 minutes while weather is updated every 15 minutes.