Need to get the ultrasonic sensor up. Anyone want to have a go at it?

The startup emailer was just not working on my Raspberry Pi 3 running OctoPi (3D printer control software).

I found two reasons:

(1) OctoPi is installed on Raspian-Jessie-Lite, a stripped down version of the sofware. This OS lacks some of the files needed to do your "UPDATED METHOD FOR PIXEL NEW PI: 12 03 17" method of running at startup.

(2) So I had to go with the older "rc.local" method. I followed those instructions, but my R-Pi3 would not find and log onto the network. It turns out that the Pi was trying to send out the email before the Pi had finished logging on the the network. I fixed this by inserting sleep 15 into rc.local just before the sudo python /home/pi/startup_maily.py & command. It's been working without a problem since that change.

I'm sure there are more elegant solutions to adding sleep15 in item #2 above, but it got me up and running.

Thanks again for making this available! It has certainly simplified using the 3D printer attached to a Raspberry Pi3 in the classroom where I volunteer.

-You can probably use a piece of White Styrofoam to make sure proper reflection occurs
-What data does the Thingspeak upload? Is it the CSV file? If so, how does it receive the file in the code to upload to the web and how does the code create a CSV file:
#writes this data to a table (a .csv file), this is needed for the graph with open("cpu_dists.csv", "a") as log: # "a" means append to the end log.write("{0},{1}\n".format(strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"),str(mode))) and the function:

`def updateThingSpeak(): #sends data to a webpage
   print('starting...') 
   baseURL = 'https://api.thingspeak.com/update?api_key=%s' % myAPI  


   try:
       print("The mode being sent to the web is " + str(mode) + "cm") 
       f = urlopen(baseURL + "&field1=%s" % (str(mode))) 
       print (f.read()) 
       f.close() 
       sleep(30) #uploads sensor values every 30 secs`

• How does this for Loop, only take 10 Measurements if the variable is equal to 50? `number_of_readings = 50 #how many readings to take and find the mode of

  for pizza in range(number_of_readings): #takes 10 readings
  distance = distcheck() #checks distance
  readings_list.append(int(distance)) #puts the 10 values in a list`

-Is this code for getting the mathematical mode of all the readings? Is this the figure going to be shown in the CSV file? print(readings_list) #prints the list and gets the mode (most common value) mode = max(set(readings_list), key=readings_list.count) print("The mode of " + str(number_of_readings) + " values is " + str(mode))

-Finally, should the limit be the number the user inputted in the first place? It is set as <10 currently: limit=input("Set a limit in cm to trigger an email alert eg. 5 ") and if mode <10 and mailAlert == 1: #sends email if mode is <10cm send_mail_alert()

There is loads of cool things in the code that will help us out but using the CSV table and an iOT system, makes it a very powerful system altogether!

Daniel,