James Leighton

Getting as much data into Exist as I can is important to me. So far this year I’ve built integrations for…

• Gaming Time
• Pages Read (via iOS Shortcuts)
• Money Spent (using the Monzo API)

This post details how I am tracking gaming time. I found a method around Christmas 2019 that lets you retrieve accurate playtime from your Nintendo Switch via the parental controls app/feature. This was cool, but I don’t always play things on my Switch, so we had to go deeper!

Taking that a bit further, I discovered a project on Github that tracked all of this data (and more!) into ‘InfluxDB’. InfluxDB is a ‘time series’ database, and as such is really good at storing data like the amount of time you played in a day, the temperature of your living room, or the level of sunlight your house receives at intervals throughout the day.

You can then visualise this data with ease in ‘Grafana’ - I played around with the gaming dashboard available from the previously mentioned project, and tailored it for the data I want to see. For example, I don’t care about achievements so they got removed from the dashboard layout.

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To take this a step further, I wrote a small python script that retrieves playtime for a given day and submits it to Exist.io. This let’s it become a part of the trend and correlation engine that powers the Exist dashboard.

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My python code can be found https://github.com/jleighton/influx_gaming_to_exist. I have this code submitting to exist.io every hour on a cronjob. The code that retrieves Switch playtime runs every 4 hours during the day, Steam and Rescuetime run hourly (just before the Exist push happens)

What this means is that whether I play something on Steam, other PC games like OpenTTD, or my Nintendo Switch all the playtime gets captured and logged without a second thought. It just works, and that’s awesome.

I realised that I then needed someway of logging playtime on systems that can’t automatically post their data; such as my trusty 3DS, Snes Classic, and any games I play on my phone or tablet. This is a topic for another post, but what I did was build a small python based web interface (Flask based) to log playtime. Sneak peak below…

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