offmessage / blackpearl

For twisted little pirates

blackpearl

Flotilla for Twisted Little Pirates

blackpearl aims to provide an easy to use Python framework to allow coders from novice to expert to interact with Pimoroni's Flotilla. As well as being easy to use it is also fast; blisteringly fast. Hence its name.

I've heard of one, supposed to be very fast, nigh uncatchable: The Black Pearl

(It also helps that we're using Twisted under the hood, and the crew of The Black Pearl were definitely ... twisted)

It is available on GitHub at https://github.com/offmessage/blackpearl This is where you should raise issues, should you find any. Increasingly complete documentation is available at https://offmessage.github.io/blackpearl/

blackpearl is capable of taking input from multiple inputs, processing that input and sending it to multiple outputs with the Rpi2 running at around 4% processor load. In other words, you could be playing with your Flotilla whilst also watching an HD movie. On a Raspberry Pi. Neat, huh?

It has a quick "plug and play" style of coding that allows users to get started very quickly, but provides a rich API under the hood that more experienced coders can use for far more complex projects.

And when I say get started very quickly, this is all the code you have to write to get the rainbow module displaying the colour that the colour sensor is currently looking at:

class ColourMatcher(Module):
    hardware_required = [Colour, Rainbow,]
    listening_for = ['colour']

    def receive(self, message):
        r, g, b = message['colour']['rgb']
        self.rainbow.set_all(r, g, b)
        self.rainbow.update()

Installation

Right now you need to know what you're doing, Python-wise, to use it so I'm deliberately making the instructions very high level. If the following don't make sense you should probably hang on for a bit. Version 1.0.0 is just around the corner and will be well documented:

cd ~/projects
git clone https://github.com/offmessage/blackpearl
cd blackpearl
virtualenv -p python3 venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -e .

To see what it's capable of, connect all of the following to your Flotilla (and connect your Flotilla to your Rpi2):

• The rainbow
• The touch

And then:

cd ~/projects/blackpearl
source venv/bin/activate
cd blackpearl/projects
python touchtherainbow.py

Further examples are in the examples/ directory. More documentation is available at https://offmessage.github.io/blackpearl/ - this is slowly improving. Bear with me.