Raspberry Pi and NeoPixel Stock Symbol Price Monitor

The Project

This is a simple stock ticker price change monitor of today's positive or negative change using green or red NeoPixel LEDs.

What does this do?

• Tracks a stock ticker symbol

• If price change is positive the LED lights are green

• If price change is negative the LED lights are red

• Brightness intensity level increases or decreases with amount of change

This project uses an Adafruit NeoPixel LED strip running on a Raspberry Pi 2 to visualize the positive or negative price change of a stock ticker symbol by fetching stock quote data from Yahoo Finance once per second and using either red or green LED colors and a higher or lower LED brightness intensity level to indicate the amount of price change.

Features:

• Checks day of week and time, lights NeoPixel during normal stock market hours (M-F, 9:30 AM - 4PM)

• Uses ystockquote to get the specified ticker symbol, example: AAPL

• Lights up NeoPixel red/green + brightness intensity levels

• Basic error handling for when urllib returns a 404, Connection reset by peer, or N/A for ticket symbol data

• Shuts off the LEDs when the script exits or while the stock market is closed

Hardware:

• Raspberry Pi 2

• Adafruit NeoPixel Stick - 8 x 5050 RGB LED

• Adafruit Pi Cobbler Plus (optional)

• Breadboard (optional)

• Alligator clips (optional)

Software:

• Latest Raspbian Jessie

• Python 2.7.9

• Python module ystockquote

• Raspberry Pi PWM library for WS281X LEDs (rpi_ws281x)

• My Python script

Hardware Instructions:

1. Plug Raspberry Pi into power and ethernet (or setup wireless).

2. Connect Pi Cobbler and Breadboard (optional).

3. Use Alligator clips or other wires to connect Adafruit NeoPixel stick: Ground to Ground on RPi, 5VDC to 5V on RPi, and DIN on NeoPixel Stick to GPIO pin 18 on RPi.

Software Instructions:

1. Install latest Raspbian version on the RPi 2.

2. Run the following commands to install the required packages and libraries:

sudo apt-get update -y
sudo apt-get install build-essential python-dev python-pip git scons swig wget -y
sudo pip install ystockquote
git clone https://github.com/jgarff/rpi_ws281x.git
cd rpi_ws281x
scons
cd python
sudo python setup.py install

More detailed guide to setting up the Adafruit NeoPixel on a Raspberry Pi here: https://learn.adafruit.com/neopixels-on-raspberry-pi/software

3. Download my python script to the rpi_ws281x/python directory:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/swoodford/raspberrypi/master/stockmonitor-neopixel.py && chmod +x stockmonitor-neopixel.py

4. Run the script:

sudo python stockmonitor-neopixel.py