Brendan Inglis

Lifelong learner interested in solving unique multi-disciplinary problems involving medical device design, image based finite element analysis, programming, & biomechanics

NPR Alarm Clock

Using selenium and a chron job to create a simple alarm clock that plays NPR local news radio every weekday morning. What better way to wake up than with NPR’s Morning Edition? I was inspired to make this project as a way to combine Python programming practice and my enjoyment of listening to NPR in the mornings. I used a cron job on my mac to run the python script each morning at 8:10am.

Selenium

The selenium package opens an instance of a Chrome browser and presses the “Play” buttons for you. The chromedriver can be downloaded here. Be sure to match the version of chromedriver with your version of Chrome.

The main function of selenium in this case is to search the html of the NPR Morning Edition page to find the class of the object needed to play the live radio. See the main chunk below:

# set chrome driver to open without GUI
options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
options.add_argument('headless')

# Using Chrome to access web without GUI
driver = webdriver.Chrome(executable_path='./chromedriver', options=options)  # headless (no window)

# Open the website
driver.get('https://www.npr.org/programs/morning-edition/')

Make sure to include the WebDriverWait lines to prevent this error:

selenium.common.exceptions.NoSuchElementException: Message: no such element: Unable to locate element: {"method":"css selector","selector":".btn-live-radio"}

Without it your code barrels on to the next command without waiting for the webpage to update, so it thinks the element for the hidden button is missing.

Cron job

This cron job will run the NPR_Alarm_Clock.py file every weekday morning at 8:10am.

SHELL=/bin/bash
PATH=/usr/local/bin/:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin
10 8 * * 1-5 export DISPLAY=:0 && cd /path/to/python/file && python3 NPR_Alarm_Clock.py
  • NOTE: cron job will not execute when your computer is asleep. I am looking into a way around this, but the simplest work around for now is to schedule your computer to wake up a minute before the cron job is set to execute-
  • On a mac: System Preferences > Energy Saver > Schedule

Features to Implement

  • Ability to pause and unpause cron job (need to look into command line more)
  • Include case for closing the browser window early without erroring out
  • Chromedriver does not automatically update, causing the script to fail when a new version of Chromedriver is available. Looking into combining some other open source for auto-updates into this project

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