Just for fun and practice - wouldn’t it be cool to have a 4-digit, 7-segment LED display that shows the number of online visitors to… something?
A nice candidate for the data provider was ETV, a national public television station that’s viewable online. Its web interface refreshes the viewer count via HTTP queries to an internal JS API that suits our needs quite well.
Hooking up the LED display backpack was easy. Some quick Python code to do the parsing and display… and we have a nice physical, real-time counter to see how many people are watching the channel at the moment.