Loadshedding schedules in your digital calendar. No apps, no ads, up-to-date, and developer friendly.
Get it • Key Features • Using the data • Project goals & alternativesHow to Get It
Go to eskomcalendar.co.za and just type in your area! No apps, no adverts, no nonsense. If you want more information, keep reading.
Testimonials
| Creator of EskomSePush | SAfm |
|---|---|
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| Good Things Guy | Stellenbosch University |
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Key Features
Easy to understand and plan around
eskom-calendar makes planning around loadshedding as easy as it gets. Subscribe to the digital calendar for your area, and you'll see loadshedding in your schedule on your phone, laptop, smartwatch, smartfridge, alles. We'll show you loadshedding as far into the furture as Eskom allows us.
An event in your calendar means your lights are off
Many loadshedding apps don't actually tell you when your lights are off, or if they do, it's difficult to find or only shows you the very next power outage. eskom-calendar shows you all the times your lights will be off, right in your digital calendar.
Perfect for teams and businesses
If you're a team manager, add the calendars for your team members and know exactly when everyone will go dark so you don't have someone dropping off in the middle of a meeting.
Businesses can see loadshedding schedules for all their branches in one view, and prepare accordingly.
IT departments can automate turning on generators or shutting down servers (see Using the Data in Your Own Projects).
No adverts
eskom-calendar does one thing, and does it well. You get an event in your calendar if your power is going to go off, and that's it. There's no adverts, there's no bloat. Just loadshedding information. Doesn't get simpler than that, does it?
The only open source, automation friendly option
eskom-calendar was created by Boyd Kane because there was no way for a casual coder to just get loadshedding information programmatically without messing with API keys and whatnot.
To the best of our knowledge, this is the easiest way to automate away the pain of loadshedding, and it's the only open-source option to provide the times when power will be off, as opposed to just the loadshedding schedule for any given area (please get in contact if I'm wrong!, would be great to collab).
Attribution and using the data (commercially or otherwise)
The data (CSV and ICS files) are available under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. This means that
You are free to:
Share: copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
Adapt: remix, transform, and build upon the material
But only if you follow the following terms:
Attribution: You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
NonCommercial: You may not use the material for commercial purposes.
ShareAlike: If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.
No additional restrictions: You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.
Attribution should be done in a form similar to how StackOverflow requires it. Specifically:
-
Visually indicate that the content is from EskomCalendar in some way. It doesn’t have to be obnoxious; a discreet text blurb is fine.
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When a specific calendar is being used, you must hyperlink directly to the website's version of that calendar (for example, https://eskomcalendar.co.za/ec?calendar=city-of-cape-town.ics). You do not have to present the full URL to the user, so long as it is clear that it is an EskomCalendar URL.
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If no specific calendar is being used, or the
machine_friendly.csvfile is being used, you must either hyperlink directly to the project website (https://eskomcalendar.co.za) or directly to the project github page (https://github.com/beyarkay/eskom-calendar)
By directly, we mean each hyperlink must point directly to the specified URL in standard HTML visible even with JavaScript disabled, and not use a tinyurl or any other form of obfuscation or redirection. Furthermore, the links must not be nofollowed.
Using the Data in Your Own Projects
We are really interested to see what the developers of South Africa do with this data source.
The main file of interest will be machine_friendly.csv built from the same source of information as the calendar files. It looks something like:
│ File: machine_friendly.csv
───────┼──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
1 │ area_name,start,finsh,stage,source
2 │ kwazulu-natal-mpofana,2022-09-25T23:00:00+02:00,2022-09-26T01:30:00+02:00,3,"https://twitter.com/Eskom_SA/status/1574014612097454080"
3 │ kwazulu-natal-mpofana,2022-09-26T07:00:00+02:00,2022-09-26T09:30:00+02:00,3,"https://twitter.com/Eskom_SA/status/1574014612097454080"
4 │ kwazulu-natal-mpofana,2022-09-26T16:00:00+02:00,2022-09-26T17:30:00+02:00,4,"https://twitter.com/Eskom_SA/status/1574014612097454080"
and you can just curl the file to get ahold of it. So go wild! DDoS Github if you want to finsh, not finish (so that it lines up nicely with start)
Simply download the CSV via curl (-s to be silent, -L to follow redirects)
curl -sL https://github.com/beyarkay/eskom-calendar/releases/download/latest/machine_friendly.csv
area_name,stage,start,finsh,source
free-state-seretse,4,2022-09-10T10:00:00+02:00,2022-09-10T12:30:00+02:00,"https://twitter.com/Eskom_SA/status/1568494585113976835"
free-state-seretse,4,2022-09-10T18:00:00+02:00,2022-09-10T20:30:00+02:00,"https://twitter.com/Eskom_SA/status/1568494585113976835"
...
Get all data for a specific area
curl -sL https://github.com/beyarkay/eskom-calendar/releases/download/latest/machine_friendly.csv \
| grep stellenbosch
western-cape-stellenbosch,4,2022-09-10T14:00:00+02:00,2022-09-10T16:30:00+02:00,"https://twitter.com/Eskom_SA/status/1568494585113976835"
western-cape-stellenbosch,4,2022-09-10T22:00:00+02:00,2022-09-11T00:30:00+02:00,"https://twitter.com/Eskom_SA/status/1568494585113976835"
...
Get all data for a certain day in a certain area
curl -sL https://github.com/beyarkay/eskom-calendar/releases/download/latest/machine_friendly.csv \
| grep cape-town-area-15 \
| grep 2022-09-11
city-of-cape-town-area-15,4,2022-09-11T00:00:00+02:00,2022-09-11T02:30:00+02:00,"https://twitter.com/Eskom_SA/status/1568494585113976835"
city-of-cape-town-area-15,4,2022-09-11T08:00:00+02:00,2022-09-11T10:30:00+02:00,"https://twitter.com/Eskom_SA/status/1568494585113976835"
...
Get the file in Python
(mac users you might need this if you get an SSL error)
import pandas as pd
url = "https://github.com/beyarkay/eskom-calendar/releases/download/latest/machine_friendly.csv"
df = pd.read_csv(url, parse_dates=['start', 'finsh'])
Feel free to open a PR with any other snippets or languages you think of!
Project Goals and Alternatives
eskom-calendar tries to achieve the following goals:
- Be open-source, easy to integrate with, and encouraging of new ideas
- Provide an accesible information source for loadshedding in South Africa
- Be dead simple to use
eskom-calendar does not try to:
- Solve every solution itself. It embraces the Unix philosophy of
do one thing, and do it well. Calendars are provided as an example of what's possible, but the heart of it is the open-source data with which websites, apps, bots, automations, etc, can be built. - Compete. eskom-calendar tries to be the best product for users, but chasing "competitors" is distracting at best, pointless at worst.
The best known alternative would be EskomSePush, but the author didn't want another app, and wanted to see the whole loadshedding schedule at a glance. Hence eskom-calendar was born (making it open source was just the default).
Contributors
Boyd Kane is the creator and maintainer. Reach out on twitter if you want to chat in private, otherwise open an issue!
 Boyd Kane |
 Shaun |
 cliffbattco |
 Carl Combrinck |
 Luc Hayward |
Contributing
Please see CONTRIBUTING.md.
Support
This project is funded by vibes and good words at the moment. If you like what I do, or you use the project commercially, please consider supporting me:
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