When we speak of “automation”, people usually think more about major changes in technology and job losses. But there are much more good things about automation than bad. I’m glad to say that automation is a boon for expert procrastinators and lazy techies like me.
Automation is basically the process by which various actions, procedures, and operations that can be performed by machines with minimal human assistance are programmed to do so. Automation avoids manual repetition of common tasks by offloading them to the system.
What to automate? Automation is a vast field, and you can think of automating almost anything and everything in your daily life.
Starting from the moment you wake up: What do you do once you wake up and grab a hot coffee? Check the news! Well, we can automate that too. Scrolling and surfing through news websites is a boring task, especially during early morning lazy hours. Simply, we can automate this task with a python app and run it every morning.
Sounds cool? Let’s check out some of the other interesting python automation project ideas. I’ll link to some tutorials so that you can learn how to implement these ideas. Let’s get into it.
A Fully Automated Crypto Trading Bot
There are a lot of automated crypto trading bots out there in the market. Why not try developing one on our own!
Here’s a project to try developing a program that buys and sells cryptocurrencies for us and also checks if it can trade a certain amount of money even if left unsupervised.
The basic requirements for this project include a pretty good idea of cryptocurrency arithmetic and some programming skills.
The trading strategy that we make use of here is “trend following”. It is basically investing based on the momentum. In trend-following, we identify the average price of crypto and check if it is increasing or decreasing.
If it’s increasing then that’s what we call an uptrend, which is the suitable time for buying, and if it’s decreasing, that’s a downtrend, which is a good time to sell.
Now compare the current real-time price with the last average price. If the current price is larger than the average price, that’s an uptrend, and if it’s lower or equal that indicates a downtrend.
Well, that’s just a vague idea of how the whole trading works. Before beginning with the project, we need a crypto exchange, which helps us in buying and selling currencies. A lot of such exchanges with API are available, which helps to execute code for trading.
Don’t invest all your money using this strategy. I’m not giving you any financial advice. Consider this as a fun project. If you know about cryptocurrencies and investing, then you can do this automation seriously.
Check out this complete video to learn more about the whole procedure.
A Raspberry Pi Web Server
This is actually an interesting project where we are going to set up a local web server using Raspberry Pi. We will also develop a flask website/API, which is hosted on this raspberry pi, and the website will be capable of performing certain tasks.
Here in this video, they have provided the functionality of turning lights on and off. The specialty of this website is that it can be accessed from any part of the world. That essentially means you can control various gadgets of your home or office from any part of the world.
If you are interested in doing this, click here to check out the complete video tutorial for doing this project.
A Secure Password Manager using Python
Remembering different passwords for various sites could be a hectic task. But at the same time, keeping your passwords safe from others is also a pretty big concern.
There are password managers like LastPass, Dashlane, etc., for storing your passwords. But, why use those platforms when you can create your own password manager by yourself.
A password manager developed using python and SQL has the solution for this problem. Here the SQL database can store all our passwords in an encrypted form. This encryption is based on a hashing function.
All you have to remember is one master password to unlock the database. So whenever you need to type in a password, just go to the database, copy and paste the required password, and that’s it.
If you are a person who uses a lot of online websites and apps, this is a project that you must consider doing to secure your passwords. Click here to learn more about this exciting Python project.
Automatic Time Tracking Tool
If you are a productivity geek like me, then this is an amazing project for you. You can this project to manage your time wisely and enhance your productivity.
The aim of this project is to automatically track the current website or application in use and also the time spent on these sites and applications. Using a JSON file, the data will be saved so that it can be used later as and when needed.
We can specifically mention tracking usage of certain apps or sites that you overuse. This project can be pretty useful in analyzing your social media usage and control it if you wish to do so.
If you are excited about this project, check out this link for more implementation details about this project.
Automatic Desktop Cleaner
I like to keep my desktop clean always. I don’t like seeing a desktop with a lot of junk and useless files. If you are someone who likes to keep your desktop in an arranged manner, you can definitely consider doing this automation project.
The automatic desktop cleaner is going to be a project that can help you arrange various files and folders on your computer and also remove junk files.
Some of the functionalities of this desktop cleaner include tasks like automatic shifting of downloaded files to appropriate folders, file organization based on required criteria, and arrangement of files based on different types.
If you like to automate the process of cleaning your desktop, check out this video for more information.
Instagram Automation
Social media plays an active role in our daily life, and the activities we do in these apps are almost recurring ones. So why not try automating these social media activities!
In this project, we try to automate Instagram activities like photo uploading, following and unfollowing users, etc. Instabot is used here to interact with Instagram.
The same procedure can be applied to automate other social media activities too.
For detailed information about this project, check out this video.
Web Scraping using Python
Web scraping is the technique by which you can turn the entire internet into your database. This process is used to extract large amounts of data from web applications and websites.
The extracted data from these sites will usually be stored as tables in a local database or file on the computer. Libraries like Beautiful soup, selenium, and pandas are employed for automating web scraping.
This project can get you started on more web scraping innovations.
To give it a try, check out this tutorial video.
I’ve written an article about the basics of web scraping. You can check it out if you’re interested.
Chatbots
Chatbots are in high demand these days and that makes this a suitable field for implementing python automation. Chatbots are a true blessing in the e-commerce field these days to provide efficient customer management service.
Python libraries like ChatterBot help in generating accurate automated responses in various languages. Click on this link to take a deep dive into more details.
Final Thought
These are some interesting topics in automation with python. The more you deal with them, the more you find it exciting. The scope for automation is everywhere, and you can find ways to automate many things if you can do some brainstorming.
As anything and everything can be automated now, start with some of these projects and then try automating your favorite activities.
Happy Coding 🙂
