Question

I am trying to write a python script that is linked to an ever updating excel sheet with lists of temperatures. We have stations in 15 countries that take record ocean/atmospheric temperatures at 10 min intervals and sends them to us, it runs 24/7/365. The excel file is 10 columns wide and several thousand rows long, every 10 minutes there is a new row with new numbers. We are concerned when the difference between the temps changes too quickly or too slowly and we continuously check it by hand. We have several dozen conditions that we are constantly monitoring and checking by hand, usually just checking the latest row in a column to see if its in a certain (2 degree) range from a row that is 50 or 100 or 1000 rows above the latest row. Has anyone worked with anything similar? I would basically like to write a script that is always running and checking is several conditions are true. I would like to be able to just write the 40 or 50 conditions into the script and anytime one of the conditions is TRUE i would get a notifications such as ‘Condition number 8 is now true’. Any suggestions on python libraries or books that I can use that are specifically for this purpose?

Answer 1

First off, it sounds like your system would be far better if it was a webapp backed by an actual database. This would be trivial to create based on your problem description so far. That aside, this looks like what you want: http://www.python-excel.org/

Run your script with a cron job (or scheduled task if your on windows) and you should be golden.