Last Wednesday if you would have asked what I had planned for Easter I would have said something like, “Going to hide some eggs for my daughter even though she knows the Easter bunny isn’t real.”
Then suddenly my wife and I were planning on entertaining for 11 family members. My how things change!
Since I was going to have family over, some of whom are Giants fans, I wanted to show them the ITFDB program I have set up with my Pi.
The only problem is that they would be over at 10am and leave by 2pm while the game doesn’t start until 5:37pm (Thanks ESPN).
To help demonstrate the script I wrote a demo script to display a message on the Pi and play the Vin Scully mp3.
The Code was simple enough:
from sense_hat import SenseHat
import os
def main():
sense = SenseHat()
message = '#ITFDB!!! The Dodgers will be playing San Francisco at 5:37pm tonight!'
sense.show_message(message, scroll_speed=0.05)
os.system("omxplayer -b /home/pi/Documents/python_projects/itfdb/dodger_baseball.mp3")
if __name__ == '__main__':
main()
But then the question becomes, how can I easily launch the script without futzing with my laptop?
I knew that I could run a shell script for the Workflow app on my iPhone with a single action, so I wrote a simple shell script
python3 ~/Documents/python_projects/itfdb/demo.py
Which was called itfdb_demo.sh
And made it executable
chmod u+x itfdb_demo.sh
Finally, I created a WorkFlow which has only one action Run Script over SSH and added it to my home screen so that with a simple tap I could demo the results.
The WorkFlow looks like this:
Nothing too fancy, but I was able to reliably and easily demonstrate what I had done. And it was pretty freaking cool!