Grab the price of bitcoin?

[joeyjoe]

Wheres a good place to return the current price of bitcoins. Im preferbly after a PHP script that just returns the price, or some TCP connection or somthing?

the reason is so i can use it to display the price on my arudino

[error]

You'll need to do your own error checking; this isn't particularly robust.

Code:

function mtgox()
{
        $mtgox = file_get_contents("https://www.mtgox.com/code/data/ticker.php");
        if (!$mtgox) return 0;
        $mtgox = json_decode($mtgox);
        return $mtgox->ticker->last;
}

[ne1]

That sound cool, is love to have an arguing mtgox ticker.  I've got an arduino, Ethernet shield and an lcd.  Love to see where you get with this.

[pent]

You'll need to do your own error checking; this isn't particularly robust.

Code:

function mtgox()
{
        $mtgox = file_get_contents("https://www.mtgox.com/code/data/ticker.php");
        if (!$mtgox) return 0;
        $mtgox = json_decode($mtgox);
        return $mtgox->ticker->last;
}

not ideal. I'll advice to use volume-based rate. In this script it calculates average volume-based rate for last 3 hours.

Code:

<?
$ch=curl_init('https://mtgox.com/code/data/getTrades.php');
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT,10);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_TIMEOUT,15);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,true);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER,false);
$headers = array(
//      "Host: mtdox.com",
        "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686) AppleWebKit/534.30 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/12.0.742.112 Safari/534.30",
        "Accept: */*",
        "Accept-Language: en-US;q=0.8,en;q=0.4",
);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $headers); 
$ret=curl_exec($ch);
if (curl_errno($ch)!=0) {
    echo curl_error($ch);
    curl_close($ch);
    exit;
}
curl_close($ch);

$o=json_decode($ret,true);
if (!is_array($o)) exit("Invalid data");

$o1=array_reverse($o);
$start=$o1[0]['date'];
$end=$start-3*60*60;
$total_btc=0;
$total_usd=0;
$cnt=0;
for (reset($o1);list(,$v)=each($o1);) {
    if ($v['date']<$end) break;
    $total_usd=$total_usd + $v['price']*$v['amount'];
    $total_btc+=$v['amount'];
    $cnt++;
}

if ($total_usd <=0 || $total_btc<=0) exit("Zero volume");

$rate=$total_usd / $total_btc;

echo "Rate is $rate USD/BTC\n";

Also, mtgox has some 'vwap' key in ticker array. I don't know what exact meaning it has, but it is near to the value my script provides. Maybe for different time period.

[Cryptoman]

OP, how are you able to run a PHP script on an Arduino?

[joeyjoe]

OP, how are you able to run a PHP script on an Arduino?

Run a PHP script on a webserver, and grab the webserver text to the arduino then display on LCD.

I have managed to connect the arduino directly to the ticker, but have to work out a way to parse the output more easily,