Sometime in 2021 the API I was using to collect information on Bin Collection in York stopped working, and it took me an inordinate amount of time to get to finding out what had happened.
It appears the API I was using was replaced by a simpler one - although the documentation appears to say that this one has been the one since 2016…
So I have (finally), updated the shim I used to pull the data.
“Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan”
There have been many people who have claimed to be “The Inventor of Freeserve”, although in many cases it appears the more fuss they make about this title the less they had to do with it… I wasn’t in the room when that particular proposal was made (although I have quite strong suspicions on who originally proposed the idea), but I was on the original implementation team within Planet Online.
I have spent a substantial number of years mostly programming in Perl, but this year I have been working on a team that has a strong preference for Python and so I have converted across.
Previously I have dabbled in Python - I could read basic python, and had patched various things - mainly Ansible - in the past, but had not done any serious work in the language.
However its not the transfer to the language thats caused most of the headaches, but other things surrounding that - for example:-
Previously I had built a shim to make it much easier to import data from the York Bin Collections API into Home Assistant
I am making use of this data in two ways:-
Making a display card in Lovelace to display information about the next bin collection. Making a notification to prod me to put the right bins out. Lovelace Display This is currently a prototype - and I need to spend more time on working out exactly what I want from the Home Assistant display - I may move to building a substantially minimised display for use with a spare Nook that I have - in a similar way to Turn an old eReader into an Information Screen (Nook STR)
I’ve done some tidying of the old posts - mostly this should have zero effect on what you see, but the Markdown has been tidied (line wraps added in to make editing more comfortable), and any internal links should now be internal rather than going back to the previous wordpress site.
Now to actually add some current content…
I have been using Home Assistant to automate various things at home. One of the things I thought would be useful was the ability for the system to inform me of when the next bin collection is, and what sort of collection this would be.
Thankfully York Council has an API telling you about their bin collections. This is documented at York Waste Collection Lookup
Home Assistant REST Sensors Home Assistant helpfully can use REST sources as a sensor.
After a vastly long hiatus (the post 5 years back stating I intended to blog more really doesn’t count), I’ve finally put something together.
Basically I have a batch of things I am trying out and so want to keep more permanent notes on, hence bringing this back into play.
Hosting Previously I put content onto wordpress.com – I certainly did not want to get involved in actually managing the blogging platform.