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My Dad has had solar panels fitted and the company who are behind the panels have requested that he records the output at 6pm each day. He can view the output from his computer via a web page on the local network. He's asked me if I can write something to automatically do this for him.
If i csn download the page then writing a script to get the value out of the page is no problem. So is there some way to download the web page on a schedule using windows? On Linux I could probably just use wget but I don't know enough about windows to know what's available. Also, how do I schedule a script to run, is there a windows version of cron jobs? I know that I could google but this place often seems to provide answers with better explanations to the exact problem! Thanks in advance.
Excel links to web pages quite well. I would use an Excel sheet with an auto open macro that then saves the value.
Under the control panel in windows there is a task scheduler that is like Cron, it does rely on the computer bring on at that time every day though. Sounds like a odd way to have to collect the data though.
If you are capable at coding the grabbing the express version of Visual Studio would allow you to knock up an exe that can be called by the scheduled task. All you'd need the exe to do it a webrequest to the page to get the html, then you'd need to parse the response object to get the value. Stackoverflow will become your friend if you do go down this route.
There are probably php scripts online too that might be easier to get up and running - not really my area of expertise though.