November 2017 Posts

As with many of my projects, it started with something that made me angry. In this case, it was this: The Petmate Le Bistro Pet Feeder. Okay, let’s back up a little bit. Back to about 8 or so years ago. We had a cat at the time, Pumpkin, who as objectively not a good cat. She was foul tempered on the best of days and very difficult to love. But she was my wife and I’s first pet, so we did love her all the same. She had a habit of wanting food precisely on time. And if it was late, she would raise all manner of noise until she was fed. Often this came at some ungodly early time in the morning. So I bought a Petmate Le Bistro Pet Feeder.

So I’ve been doing a bit of Python recently for a project I’m working on on a Raspberry Pi. There will be a longer blog post about that in the next few weeks. But one thing I ran up against was that I wanted to start my daemon, written in Python, using a systemd service on Raspbian. Normally, you would just shove a script invocation into a systemd unit and call it good, but in my case I had made use of Pipenv, which is a bit like Bundler in the Ruby world and Composer in the PHP world, to manage my project’s dependencies.