Date
Monday, 28 Aug 2017 6:00 PM
Come and learn, share, grow, meet new people, and visit old friends at our monthly meeting! We’ll be talking about the Python programming language and anything that intersects it, and the cool stuff you can do with it.
Come and learn, share, grow, meet new people, and visit old friends at our monthly meeting! We’ll be talking about the Python programming language and anything that intersects it, and the cool stuff you can do with it.
This month is “Python vs the Hardware” with Neil Ludban.
Neil will present several short talks around the themes of embedded systems and interfacing Python with unsupported hardware. The focus will be on the software techniques and tools, and should be generally applicable to Python on other hardware and operating systems. These projects are all current works in progress, but live demos will be attempted.
Part 1: Using libusb1 to read raw data from HIDs. Human Interface Devices such as gamepads and joysticks are a cost-effective source of switches, sliders, and electronics needed to build a physical interface for your project. We’ll use command line utilities to inspect the USB device’s descriptors, Python and libusb1 to read packets, and then try to decode the binary output.
Part 2-a: FreeBSD on the Raspberry Pi. A short PSA on why you might want to try an alternative OS on your Pi (or desktop), and what to expect if you do.
Part 2-b: Hardware debug tools. A quick overview of several ways of inspecting what’s going on between components of an electronic circuit.
Part 3: I2C serial bus for Python on FreeBSD. Implementing a C extension to work with the native “iic” generic device driver, adding a wrapper to look like the Python on Linux smbus module, then making it work with the https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/four-letter-phat.
Part 4: GPIO for Python on FreeBSD. Implementing a C extension to work with the native “gpio” generic device driver, designing a Pythonic package around it, and adding a wrapper to look like the RPi.GPIO package.
(maybe) Part 5: Bit-banging SPI over GPIO and making it work with the https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/display-o-tron hat.
Afterwards we’ll be heading to Brazenhead on 5th.
