I’m working on learning Python, and improving my coding skills in general, and have decided to take the #100DaysOfCode challenge. The official challenge website explains it all but, in a nutshell, I’m making a commitment to code for at least an hour every day, for 100 days, on my own projects outside of work. I will be posting updates on twitter, on GitHub, and on this blog. I have a couple ideas for projects to start out with, and just need to decide on a list of features I want to implement before I get started coding.
The first project I have in mind will be a tool to visualize natural gas consumption data gathered through the rtlamr tool. In addition to the gas meter data, my visualization tool will also graph the furnace thermostat on/off state data received from my home automation system via an MQTT broker. The goal is to see if I can correlate the furnace usage with any of the gas meter data received by rtlamr – I’m not seeing my gas meter’s serial number in the data and I think it may actually have a different serial number than what’s printed on the transmitter’s label. Rtlamr can output in JSON, so parsing the data won’t be challenging. I have little experience with the paho-mqtt library, however, and have never worked with any of the Python graphing libraries. I expect I’ll learn quite a bit from this first project.