I have been playing with Phidgets more and more lately. Mainly because it is forcing me to go relearn good OOP programming skills, it’s also serving to push me to learn Python. As a hardware guy, it’s always a challenge to get motivated to learn yet another new programming language. But so far, so good. I have got inputs and outputs working to a half-way decent GUI interface. Yes, I know, absolute positioning of widgets is not recommended. I am sure that I am screwing up something with classes, inheritance, encapsulation or some other software best practice. But it works.

On top of that, I have added some basic file handling to the app, it now dumps the I/O status to a CSV file at the press of a button. That let’s me manipulate in Google Spreadsheets for some cool visualizations (see above, hover your mouse over the image, it’s interactive!). Next up, using a Pyhton library that allows you to dump directly to a Google Spreadsheets through an API call.

Example code after the break…