Version 1.0 of Comcast Bandwidth Usage

November 08, 2011 at 01:01 AM

After receiving some patches on GitHub this weekend and renewing my interest in this project, I’ve decided to tag a 1.0 version of my Comcast Bandwidth Usage script! After being stable for atleast a year and combined with these new feature, it’s probably worth finally tagging a stable version.

What’s new in 1.0?

  • Android Notifications of your usage via Notify My Android
  • The ability to easily run the script on Heroku instead of your own server
  • Now using standard config.ini configuration for your Comcast username/password

What’s already there; what is this script?

  • A simple way to scrape your current bandwidth usage from Comcast’s website with the ability to specific warn you if are coming close to the 250GB soft limit

Download 1.0 now (zip).

Upgrading

If you have already been running script, it might be easiest to download the 1.0 and re-enter your Comcast login into the config.ini. The previous method of editing the script itself was pretty bad and left a lot of room for errors with source control.

Android Notifications

With commits from Adalan, you can now add your API key from Notify My Android and will be able to get your usage notifications via a push notification to your phone.

Attach the -a flag when running the script to enable these notifications.

Running On Heroku

This is a unique feature of the script, but was an idea I wanted to try: not everyone has a server running 24x7 or a place where they can easily run Python scripts like this daily.

With Heroku’s new Cedar stack, while oriented for running web applications, you can run any Python script on a daily schedule for free. It took a bit of hacking detailed here, but wasn’t impossible.

See the HEROKU_USAGE.markdown document and try running the script on Heroku!

Until bandwidth limits disappear, enjoy the script!

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