Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Raspberry Pi ISP Watchdog”.
Now that there’s a new raspberry pi 3, i’m super excited to build something with it. I saw on reddit that user alexi p built a raspberry pi based project that would tweet his internet service provider anytime. His broadband connection got super slow. I’M going to do a version of this project, but instead of setting it up to tweet my isp every time broadband gets slow, i’m going to have it dump all that information into a google spreadsheet where i can track that data over time and hopefully i’ll get Enough ammunition to have a less awkward conversation with customer service. This project will work on any edition of the raspberry pi, but we’ll be using the three, because the integrated wi-fi hardware makes the setup a breeze other than the board and an sd card. You’Ll need a usb cable for power and ethernet cable can help. With your initial setup as well, the core of this project is speed.
Test cli, a linux command line version of speedtest.net everyone’s favorite place to get bummed out by their isp, runs as a python package, so we’ll first install pip and then speed test cli once installed. It’S easy to grab and measure your broadband speed. Now that we have the command line tool installed, we can run it automatically using cron. This is going to allow you to schedule, commands to run at specified times and then log that information to a file before we start building our script, we’ll use git to install a fork of speed test.
Cli called speed, test, cli extras developed by henrik bengston. As you can see, the output is much more useful, especially since we want to create graphs running this. Every hour from kron is going to start to pile up evidence in a nicely formatted file, perfect for arguing with your broadband provider. Now that we have cron making sure that the speed test is run every hour next, we’ll need to make sure that the data is easy to get to.
We use the if this, then that maker channel to capture the output and drop it into a google spreadsheet. To do this, we’ll need to modify the speed test. Cli extras script: instead of printing out the output to a log file, we’ll make a post web request with this event name and our secret key. This will post the form with a json body consisting of three values: the latency download and upload speeds, which gets passed on to the action in the recipe.
At this point, you now have a raspberry pi based monitoring system in place to measure your broadband speed. Once an hour and automatically log it to the cloud now, could your isp argue that your wi-fi connection is interfering with the speed test yeah? They could argue that, but if you’re getting someone that intelligent on the line from customer service you’re doing better than most, this project is pretty cool right and it really just scratches the surface of what’s possible with the raspberry pi 3.. I’M donald bell. I can’t wait to see what you’ll make you .