Testing Data Logging RESTful Webservice – using Python and Thingsspeak

<div class="cs-rating pd-rating" id="pd_rating_holder_1819065_post_415"></div> <p>Your windows “TaskManager” just went LIVE!</p> <p>Imagine being able to broadcast your <a href="https://www.thingspeak.com/channels/681/charts/1?round=2&amp;timescale=2&amp;yaxis=CPU&amp;xaxis=Time&amp;title=Laptop%20CPU-MEM">CPU</a>/<a href="https://www.thingspeak.com/channels/681/charts/2?round=2&amp;timescale=2&amp;yaxis=Memory&amp;xaxis=Time">MEM</a>/Disk capacity data or data from a hardware device or appliance (Arduino based sensor) to a service. Now imagine being able to view this data in a live graphical manner and being able to share it with the rest of the world (power to correlate data sets).</p> <p>This well written article at <a href="http://www.australianrobotics.com.au/content/how-talk-thingspeak-python-memorycpu-monitor"&gt; http://www.australianrobotics.com.au/content/how-talk-thingspeak-python-memorycpu-monitor</a>  inspired me to test out this capability and this post is a testament to the ease with which it can be done and a log of some minor modifications I had to make to make the example work with the latest version of Python (3.2).</p> <p><a title="Things Speak" href="www.thingspeak.com">Thingsspeak</a> provides a data logging webservice with RESTful APIs to update the data.  I outline the steps on how to use this service and provide links to live feed from my machine.</p> <p>Steps:</p> <ul> <li style="list-style-type:none;"> <ul> <li>You will need a <a href="http://thingsspeak.com">Thingsspeak.com</a&gt; account – Signup if you haven’t already</li> <li>Create a channel at Thingsspeak [<a href="https://www.thingspeak.com/channels/">https://www.thingspeak.com/channels/</a>]</li&gt; <li>Install Python – I got <a href="http://www.python.org/getit/">version 3.2</a> and the code below uses this version</li> <li>Download <a title="psutil" href="http://code.google.com/p/psutil/">psutil  </a>– install psutil for python version 3.2. You will need this python utility to monitor your processes on your computer [CPU, Memory etc]</li> <li>Test your Thingsspeak REST call [ For example: http://api.thingspeak.com/update?key=<your_api_key_here>&field1=0&field2&&#8230;.]</li> <li>Test Python http.client and urllib.parse and then run the code below [see <a href="http://docs.python.org/py3k/library/http.client.html">http://docs.python.org/py3k/library/http.client.html</a>]</li&gt; <li>Result: You can see the graphs below, they represent the updates from my machine ….</li> </ul> </li> </ul> <p><strong>CPU</strong></p> <p><a href="https://www.thingspeak.com/channels/681/charts/1?round=2&timescale=2&yaxis=CPU&xaxis=Time&title=Laptop%20CPU-MEM"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-437" title="cpu" src="http://alok-mishra.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/cpu.jpg&quot; alt="" width="480" height="268" /></a></p> <p><strong>Memory</strong><br /> <a href="https://www.thingspeak.com/channels/681/charts/2?round=2&timescale=2&yaxis=Memory&xaxis=Time"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-438" title="mem" src="http://alok-mishra.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/mem.jpg&quot; alt="" width="475" height="264" /></a></p> <p>The following code was obtain from <a href="https://github.com/sirleech/thingspeak">https://github.com/sirleech/thingspeak</a&gt; and modified to use the python 3.2 libraries</p> <pre> #-------------------------------------------------------------------- # # Original Source: https://github.com/sirleech/thingspeak #-------------------------------------------------------------------- import http.client, urllib.parse from time import localtime, strftime # download from http://code.google.com/p/psutil/ import psutil import time def doit(): cpu_pc = psutil.cpu_percent() mem_avail_mb = psutil.avail_phymem()/1000000 params = urllib.parse.urlencode({'field1': cpu_pc, 'field2': mem_avail_mb,'key':'XBYEL45GOXF7F760'}) headers = {"Content-type": "application/x-www-form-urlencoded","Accept": "text/plain"} conn = http.client.HTTPConnection("api.thingspeak.com:80") try: conn.request("POST", "/update", params, headers) response = conn.getresponse() print (cpu_pc) print (mem_avail_mb) print (strftime("%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S", localtime())) print (response.status, response.reason) data = response.read() conn.close() except: print ("connection failed") print (response.status, response.reason) #sleep for 16 seconds (api limit of 15 secs) if __name__ == "__main__": while True: doit() time.sleep(16)</pre>

 #--------------------------------------------------------------------
 #
 # Original Source: https://github.com/sirleech/thingspeak
 #--------------------------------------------------------------------
 import http.client, urllib.parse
 from time import localtime, strftime
 # download from http://code.google.com/p/psutil/
 import psutil
 import time
def doit():
 cpu_pc = psutil.cpu_percent()
 mem_avail_mb = psutil.avail_phymem()/1000000
 params = urllib.parse.urlencode({'field1': cpu_pc, 'field2': mem_avail_mb,'key':'XBYEL45GOXF7F760'})
 headers = {"Content-type": "application/x-www-form-urlencoded","Accept": "text/plain"}
 conn = http.client.HTTPConnection("api.thingspeak.com:80")
try:
 conn.request("POST", "/update", params, headers)
 response = conn.getresponse()
 print (cpu_pc)
 print (mem_avail_mb)
 print (strftime("%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S", localtime()))
 print (response.status, response.reason)
 data = response.read()
 conn.close()
 except:
 print ("connection failed")
 print (response.status, response.reason)
#sleep for 16 seconds (api limit of 15 secs)
 if __name__ == "__main__":
 while True:
 doit()
 time.sleep(16)