My next iteration was to create a front-end application, hosted on the same rpi, that would allow anyone within my local network to change the stock ticker in realtime, simply by visiting the flask endpoint.

Flask Application

A simple front-end that only took a few lines of code. The three user inputs correspond to the three tickers displayed on the pygame application. A user in my network can go to 192.xx.xx.xx:8082 within my local network to access this light-weight flask application.

Front-End

Flask - How It Works

After a submission, the new tickers get written to a text file. The pygame application periodically checks if a modification has been made to the ticker_files.txt file. If there is a modification, the stock ticker application reads those new tickers and pulls from the yfinance module.

A few normalization and error checking steps:

• First check if the ticker is valid by hitting the yfinance module
• Stripping unnecessary quotes
• Writing to the text file

#!/usr/bin/python3

from flask import Flask, render_template, url_for, request
import yfinance as yf

app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route('/', methods =["GET", "POST"])
def home():
    if request.method == "POST":
        tk1 = request.form.get("tk1")
        tk2 = request.form.get("tk2")
        tk3 = request.form.get("tk3")
        ticker_list = [tk1,tk2,tk3]
        ticker_list_names = []
        ticker_string = ""
        for t in ticker_list:
            t = t.upper()
            ticker_string += t + ","
            t_object = yf.Ticker(t)
            if t_object.info["regularMarketPrice"] == None:
                return "You have submitted an incorrect symbol: "+ t + ", go back and resubmit"

            else:
                ticker_list_names.append(t_object.info["shortName"].split(" ")[0])

        print(ticker_list)
        print(ticker_list_names)
        ticker_string +=  ticker_list_names[0].replace(",","") + ","
        ticker_string +=  ticker_list_names[1].replace(",","") + ","
        ticker_string +=  ticker_list_names[2].replace(",","")

        text_file = open("/home/pi/Desktop/ticker_files.txt","w+")
        text_file.writelines(ticker_string)

        return  "You've submitted " + tk1 + " " + tk2 + " " +tk3


    return render_template("home.html")


def flask_run():
    app.run(host='0.0.0.0',port='8082')

flask_run()

This function is called every other second to check if there was a modification (by timestamp) to the text file. If there was a change, indicating that a user has submitted new tickers, the ticker symbols are returned and are used going forward to call the prices and % changes.

stamp_old = 0

def check_file_change():
    global stamp_old
    stamp_new = os.stat("/home/pi/Desktop/ticker_files.txt").st_mtime
    if stamp_new != stamp_old:
        #file changed
        stamp_old = stamp_new
        with open("/home/pi/Desktop/ticker_files.txt","r") as f:
            lines = f.readlines()
            return lines
    else:
        return 0