Processing errors with w1thermsensor on Raspberry Pi

Question

I'm using the w1thermsensor on a Raspberry Pi. It works, but I want to make my code robust to errors, such as hardware failure, the sensor being unplugged etc.

There doesn't seem to be any specific help in the Github repository (although I can see from the code that it can raise exceptions), nor have I found any examples online processing errors.

My code is:

try: 
    sensor = W1ThermSensor() # Assumes just one sensor available 
    sensor_detect = "Detected" 
except: 
    sensor_detect = "Detect Error" 
if sensor_detect == "Detected": 
    try: 
        air_temperature = sensor.get_temperature() 
    except: 
        air_temperature = "Get temperature Error"

Initially I didn't have the try/except checks and get failures if the sensor is either not there/removed. But I'd like to be a bit more precise by using the error conditions that the library returns. Is there a concise list of exceptions that might occur / example code for processing errors?

Answer 1

The exceptions which can be raised by the w1thermsensor package are documented in the docstrings of the methods. Eg for get_temperature() :

>>> help(w1thermsensor.core.W1ThermSensor.get_temperature)
Help on function get_temperature in module w1thermsensor.core:

get_temperature(self, unit=1)
    Returns the temperature in the specified unit

    :param int unit: the unit of the temperature requested

    :returns: the temperature in the given unit
    :rtype: float

    :raises UnsupportedUnitError: if the unit is not supported
    :raises NoSensorFoundError: if the sensor could not be found
    :raises SensorNotReadyError: if the sensor is not ready yet