Okay, so check it, today I’m gonna break down my little project, “jets score.” It’s nothin’ fancy, just a way to track the New York Jets’ game scores, kinda like my own personal scoreboard. I’m a big Jets fan, so I thought, “Why not?”
First thing I did was decide how I wanted to get the data. I didn’t wanna manually enter scores after every game, that’s a pain. So, I started lookin’ for an API – basically, a way to grab the data automatically from some website or service. Found a couple, messed around with ’em, and settled on one that seemed pretty reliable.
Next up, writing the code. I’m not a super pro coder, but I can hack my way through some Python. I basically wrote a script that would:
- Hit the API: Ask the API for the Jets’ game scores.
- Parse the data: Take the data the API sends back and pull out the stuff I care about – date, opponent, score.
- Store the data: Dump the info into a simple text file. I’m keepin’ it basic, no fancy databases or nothin’.
Then, I needed to figure out how to run this thing automatically. I didn’t wanna have to manually run the script after every game. So, I set up a cron job on my Raspberry Pi. A cron job is just a way to schedule tasks to run automatically at certain times. I told it to run my Python script every day during the NFL season.
Now, the data’s being collected, but how do I see it? I could just open the text file, but that’s boring. So, I whipped up a super simple HTML page with some JavaScript. The JavaScript reads the data from the text file (which the Python script updates) and displays it in a table on the webpage. It’s ugly, but it works.
Here’s the tricky part I ran into: getting the data from the Raspberry Pi to be accessible on the web. I didn’t want to open up my whole network. So I ended up using a simple web server running on the Pi, only serving the HTML and text file.
Finally, I tested it all out. Made sure the script was grabbing the right data, the cron job was running on schedule, and the webpage was displaying everything correctly. There were definitely some hiccups along the way – API quirks, cron job syntax errors, webpage display issues – but I got ’em all sorted out.
And that’s “jets score”! It ain’t gonna win any awards, but it’s my little project, and it keeps me up-to-date on my favorite team. Plus, it was a good excuse to mess around with APIs, Python, and cron jobs. Maybe next year I’ll add some fancy graphs or something. Who knows?
