How to get Bitcoin price on your Pi

Hey guys, today I just wanted to share a neat piece of code that allows you to retrieve the price of Bitcoin, Steem and SBD on your Raspberry Pi. You could of course add any other cryptocurrency of your liking, but this code will display those 3 as they are my favorites.

I set up this Pi yesterday and gave it as a gift to my good friend and partner @albertogm, now he doesn't have to check coinmarketcap every 5 minutes!

If you want to create your own Crypto Price Board, all you have to do is get yourself a Sensehat for your Pi and copy this Python code:

from sense_hat import SenseHat
sense = SenseHat()
from urllib.request import urlopen
import json
import time

while True:
  try:
    url = urlopen('https://poloniex.com/public?command=returnTicker').read()
    result = json.loads(url)
    SBD = result['BTC_SBD']['last']
    BTC = result['USDT_BTC']['last']
    Steem = result['BTC_STEEM']['last']
    SBD_USD = float(SBD) * float(BTC)
    STEEMUSD = float(Steem) * float(BTC)
    sense.show_message("BTC " + '{0:.0f}'.format(BTC), text_colour=[255, 215, 0])
    sense.show_message("STEEM " + '{0:.2f}'.format(STEEMUSD), text_colour=[7, 24, 138])
    sense.show_message("SBD " + '{0:.2f}'.format(SBD_USD), text_colour=[4, 112, 22])
    time.sleep(3)
  except:
    sense.show_message("failed to retrieve feed")
    time.sleep(3)

You should also add a cron job so that your script runs at starts, you can follow this guide that does just that: http://www.instructables.com/id/Raspberry-Pi-Launch-Python-script-on-startup/

Enjoy!