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.

2 comments:

  1. Thanks for this! I've been using this for a while, and it's certainly nicer than the official libFTDI Python bindings.

    A note on testing: you'll probably want to use a unit testing framework, like the built-in unittest package. Building test functions directly into your modules could get messy. Unfortunately, complete testing probably requires matching test hardware.

    PS: Do you know if it's possible to access the hardware as anyone but root? Adding myself to uucp and tty didn't seem to help.

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  2. glad to hear this is working well for you. If you have any comments / feature requests etc don't hesitate to either post them here or put them on the bitbucket page.

    re. testing, I've been lazy I'm afraid - well aware of various test frameworks but haven't got into the habit of regular TDD / mocking etc. I guess the fact that testing would take more code than the package itself has something to do with it...

    As far as hardware access is concerned, I have no need for root access on either Mac OS X (10.6) or my EEEPC 701 (Xandros) - I'll try it on my Ubuntu desktop later and see if I can get to the bottom of this - it's the sort of thing which should get into the README. I've not tested it at all under libftdi for Windows and don't plan to (though I might extend it to work with the D2XX DLL with the same API).

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