After making my Air-Gapped Raspberry Pi Zero, Raspiblitz Bitcoin / Lightning Full Node, and Pi-Hole (which was on an Intel NUC6, but could have been on a Pi), I’ve come to appreciate the high value of Raspberry Pis of all flavors. Unfortunately, they are sold out at every vendor linked from the raspberrypi.com site, probably due to the global chip shortage and (what I assume must be) the relatively low profit margins of these devices.
A week or so ago, when I was talking about side questing with a friend, and specifically the Python programming course I’ve been taking, he mentioned I could use a Python package called “Beautiful Soup” to scrape websites and notify me when a product became available. Needless to say I was intrigued…
Completed tasks:
1. Install Beautiful Soup
2. Figure out how to use Beautiful Soup to scrape an example website, in this case Canakit.com, and print if a target product was in stock or not. (I also did adafruit.com around the same time.)
3. Use Pushover to send a notification to my phone when a product is available.
4. Automate the script using a linux cron job.
5. Add in a log file that records the time and content of every search the script performs.
6. Install the script and required dependencies into my free Google Cloud Compute Engine E2-micro instance.
7a. 4/20/22: Added Vilros to the search algorithm. [Also got my first “in the wild” successful test today when my script notified me Raspberry Pi 4B 2GB’s were available at adafruit. I didn’t see the notifications in the 5 minutes before they were all sold out again, but I’m stoked that it actually worked.]
Pending tasks:
7. Add the rest of the vendors’ websites that sell Raspberry Pis.
8. Implement error handling.
9. Implement logic to stop notifications after a certain number so it doesn’t constantly ping my phone unnecessarily.
10.