Show HN:Scraping NY Times election data and displaying it on a flipdigit display

https://edwarddeaver.me/portfolio/ny-times-election-on-flip-digit

by worldmerge • 2 years ago

2 1 2 years ago

worldmerge• 2 years ago

Hi,

For the US 2024 Presidential election, I made a scraper that pulled the NY Times electoral college data and displayed it on my AlfaZeta flip-digit display. (Code [0])

It's very hard to get free electoral college data live, but at Syracuse's Open Data Day I learned the NY Times election data is just JSON files the whole site is powered by ~5 JSON files. So I got to work making a scraper for 2020's data and formatting for my display. I built a websocket serial server that runs on a Raspberry Pi so I could work on my laptop and test it. [1]

At 6 pm (eastern) the new data dropped and that resulted in a URL for the JSON and a new data structure. I spent the next 20 minutes parsing it out and then let it ran for the whole night. I took a timelapse of the night (linked in the website)[2] and added back the click-clack sounds I heard that night.

[0] https://github.com/EdwardDeaver/2024_Presidential_Election_S...

[1] https://github.com/EdwardDeaver/WeatherToMechanical

[2] https://vimeo.com/1027074047

Show HN:Scraping NY Times election data and displaying it on a flipdigit display

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