alx / Le-Github

GitHub Data Challenge experiment with Adafruit Thermo Printer

Le Github : a daily newspaper with Github Data

Success!!! finished 3rd on Github Data Challenge

Requirements

• 1 Arduino
• 1 Adafruit Thermo Printer
• le_github gem:

gem install le_github

Howto

Just one command, every morning before breakfast:

le_github

Workflow

Arduino programming

You'll need an Arduino for this setup, it'll just be used as a passthrough to your a2_printer.

To do so:

• Connect your a2_printer rx/tx wires to your arduino rx/tx pins (usually, digital pins 0 and 1)
• program your arduino with an empty sketch
• now, reading and writing on usb device from your host will go through your arduino to speak with your a2_printer

Data import

Instead of using directly Google BigQuery, LeGithubImporter is fetching its data from Github Archive website to build a large json of the last day, and to map it to something way lighter for later display in views/index.html

Page Layout

views/index.html is designed using Foundation prototyping framework from Zurb

Webpage scraping

Discovered in Freerange Printer project, you can use PhantomJS to render a webpage in an image file:

phantomjs --local-to-remote-url-access=yes rasterize.js YYYY-MM-DD /tmp/output.jpg

Image printing

a2_printer lib can be used to send the rendered image file to the thermo-printer:

require 'rubygems'
require 'a2_printer'

serial = SerialConnection.new
printer = A2Printer.new serial

printer.begin
printer.set_default
printer.print_image("/tmp/output.jpg")

LeGithubPrinter allows to split the image file to inject because only 384x384 pixels image are currently accepted in a2_printer lib

Result