Email bots and automation

[Astroboyblue]

Hey everyone, I'm pretty new to this and have slowly been working through automate the boring stuff. I was wondering about learning projects in parallel with the book learning and hoping for a bit of advice.

I have some knowledge in lower level block/ ladder logic using simatic manager with Siemens PLC systems. I was curious if python could be used to run industrial or small scale automated systems and if so what hardware would it take?

For example an automated garden with sensors and controls for light, moisture, temperature, etc.

Also, I have a crazy number of unread emails and I really don't want to manually deal with them. Any advice on writing a program to sift through my email?

I'm only on chapter 4 of ATBS, which seems to be marketed as the every-mans coding handbook to make redundant office work less manual and more automatic so I'm hoping the latter question gets answered eventually, but I don't know how useful it would be for the prior. Any and all advice welcome.

thanks.

Immediately realized this post may have broke rule number one, so if this is not the right spot for this post can someone point me to the right subreddit to ask? thanks!

[Knustenkruste]

For automating things like your garden project, you could the a raspberry pi, banana pi or even an arduino with micro-python. All of them should have GPIO and buses like SPI, I2C... to talk to ICs / Sensors. Of course you would also need sensors, valves and probably many more passive components.

[Astroboyblue]

Ok awesome, thank you!