Thursday 25 November 2010

pylibftdi updated to 0.5

I've done some tidying up of pylibftdi, fixing a few bugs, refactored the pylibftdi package to contain several modules instead of everything dumped in a __init__.py file, and generally made it a bit cleaner. It even has docstrings for most things now, and a test or two!

pylibftdi is a simple interface to libftdi, which in turn allows accessing FTDI's range of USB parallel and serial chips. See here for more details, but very briefly, serial access is provided by a file-like (read/write) interface with a baudrate property, and parallel access is provided by a pair of properties - direction (data direction register) and port (data IO register).

I haven't yet added any more examples, hopefully I'll get round to that in the next week or so. I have been using it as a MIDI interface though, which is fun - I'll get an appropriate example of that out in the next version, together with some diagrams / photos etc.

Tuesday 9 November 2010

BlogPress, iPod, website

So this is the obligatory 'testing' post from BlogPress on my new-ish iPod touch 4th gen.

I wish the battery life was better, but the retina display is awesome for reading tiny text, making ebooks surprisingly practical. It's also far too easy to spend lots of money on the app store. One nice thing is that three fingered touch typing is just about doable in landscape mode - not a skill I anticipated learning!

I've been spending lots of time recently on my website codedstructure.net, and especially on a project for playing with / learning GLSL in the context of WebGL: WebGL Shader Lab, which I'll write more about next time.

If only iOS Safari supported WebGL...

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPod