Dependencies:

Web scraping



Requests is an elegant and simple HTTP library for Python. Requests Installation & Documentation. Beautiful Soup 4 is a Python library for pulling data out of HTML and XML files. Beautiful Soup Installation & Documentation.

Python Library for Max7219 LED Matrix

Python library interfacing LED matrix displays with the MAX7219 driver (using SPI) on the Raspberry Pi. Installation. By Richard Hull

Setup & Configurations:

Once all the Prerequisites have been successfully installed, download/clone this GitHub Repository. Connect the Display to the Raspberry Pi as shown in the Schematics. Run the main program bcbar.py

Bitcoin Bar can display upto 19 different real-time data parameters. These can be configured to be displayed in any order or sequence. The main program displays all 19 data parameters sequentially.

Data parameters can be individually displayed & their order can be changed by configuring the following line in the main program:

show_message(device, disp[i], fill="white", font=proportional(LCD_FONT),scroll_delay = 0.02)

The value of i will determine the data parameter being displayed. Bitcoin Bar can display the following real-time data parameters:

INSERT TABLE WITH PARAMETERS

Scrolling Speed & Static Text

By adjusting the value of scroll_delay, the scrolling speed can be changed. The led_test.py example uses the text function to display static text.

Rate Limiting

The data parameters are web scrapped from bitcoinblockhalf.com. I have limited the number of visits to the site to once per hour so that the website is not burdened with unnecessary traffic. I use this website since it collects several of these data parameters from various other API's & hosts them centrally. Check out the websites repository for more information.

Run Program on Startup/Boot

I followed the official RasPi documentation which modifies the rc.local file in order to run the Python script on boot up.