Hi Alex.

Yes, you can do that.

For example, create the following variables at the beginning of your code: change the message_interval variable to set the interval in seconds that you’ll request data from the API (please note that for free versions of APIs, you have a limit on the number of request you can do per day).

last_message = 0
message_interval = 60

Then, add a loop like this:

while True:
  try:
    if (time.time() - last_message) > message_interval:
      CODE THAT GETS DATA
      last_message = time.time()
  except OSError as e:
    restart_and_reconnect()

I hope this helps.

Let me know if you need further help.

Regards,
Sara

Hi Sara,
 
Thanks for the reply.  Can you please explain the code so I can understand (and learn from) it? 

Hi Alex,
Lets go one line at a time. ( //  indicates the start of a comment)

while True:    // this is a loop that goes forever

try:     // tells the compiler to try this (if it causes an exception, we will handle it further down in the code)

if (time.time() - last_message) > message_interval:  // gets the current time, compares to the previous time (last_message). If it is greater than message_interval

CODE THAT GETS DATA  // this is your code that gets the required data

last_message = time.time()   // reset the last_message time to the current time (for next go through the loop)

except OSError as e:    // this is the other part of "try". So try to do this thing, and if it throws an exception, we will tell it what to do

restart_and_reconnect()    // this is what we want it to do if an exception is thrown

That’s right.
Also, I forgot to mention that you need to add the restart_and_reconnect() function to your code too.
Here’s the function:

def restart_and_reconnect():
time.sleep(10)
machine.reset()

Regards,
Sara

Thank you so much Sara and Ross. Now I can see the OWM data I need and the explanation behind the code. I added 2 things so I can see the output:
x=CODE THAT GETS DATA
print(x)

Great!
I’ll mark this question as resolved.
If you need further help, you just need to open a new question in our forum.
Regards,
Sara