Book Image

Getting Started with Python for the Internet of Things

By : Tim Cox, Steven Lawrence Fernandes, Sai Yamanoor, Srihari Yamanoor, Prof. Diwakar Vaish
Book Image

Getting Started with Python for the Internet of Things

By: Tim Cox, Steven Lawrence Fernandes, Sai Yamanoor, Srihari Yamanoor, Prof. Diwakar Vaish

Overview of this book

This Learning Path takes you on a journey in the world of robotics and teaches you all that you can achieve with Raspberry Pi and Python. It teaches you to harness the power of Python with the Raspberry Pi 3 and the Raspberry Pi zero to build superlative automation systems that can transform your business. You will learn to create text classifiers, predict sentiment in words, and develop applications with the Tkinter library. Things will get more interesting when you build a human face detection and recognition system and a home automation system in Python, where different appliances are controlled using the Raspberry Pi. With such diverse robotics projects, you'll grasp the basics of robotics and its functions, and understand the integration of robotics with the IoT environment. By the end of this Learning Path, you will have covered everything from configuring a robotic controller, to creating a self-driven robotic vehicle using Python. • Raspberry Pi 3 Cookbook for Python Programmers - Third Edition by Tim Cox, Dr. Steven Lawrence Fernandes • Python Programming with Raspberry Pi by Sai Yamanoor, Srihari Yamanoor • Python Robotics Projects by Prof. Diwakar Vaish
Table of Contents (37 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

Connecting to the Internet – web requests


Now that we discussed the try/except keywords, let's make use of it to build a simple application that connects to the Internet. We will write a simple application that retrieves the current time from the Internet. We will be making use of the requests library for Python (http://requests.readthedocs.io/en/master/#).

The requests module enables connecting to the Web and retrieving information. In order to do so, we need to make use of the get() method from the requests module to make a request:

import requests
response = requests.get('http://nist.time.gov/actualtime.cgi')

In the preceding code snippet, we are passing a URL as an argument to the get() method. In this case, it is the URL that returns the current time in the Unix format (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time).

Let's make use of the try/except keywords to make a request to get the current time:

#!/usr/bin/python3

import requests

if __name__ == "__main__":
  # Source for link: http://stackoverflow...