What is it?

One of the activities that takes place in school is a debate and discussion around the latest News stories.  This is known as "What's News"  This is produced each week and changes depending on what has been happening around the world. Producing the materials and searching for the News materials takes time.

Therefore it is the perfect project to automate and create a Raspberry Pi hack to help out.  When the program runs it begins by -
  1. Searching Sky News for 10 up to date headlines and then downloads each headline and also a web link to the main story page.  
  2. Adds the information to a list and then creates a dictionary of the data
  3. This dictionary is then used to create a Powerpoint consisting of 10 slides, and 10 hyperlinks, one on each slide.
  4. The Powerpoint is then saved and emailed to the teachers.  The whole program and sending the email takes less than 20 seconds to execute.

The program requires you to install a number of modules, open the LX Terminal and type in the following:

sudo pip3 install feedparser
pip install python-pptx
sudo apt-get install python3-lxml

Check out the videos which give you an overview of the What's News App, how it works and also how to send emails with an attachment via Python.  The code and updates to this project can be found at the github site.

App in Action