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2005-06-26T23:22:44 Baypiggies theater lighting talk: I spoke on 2005/6/9 at my local Python users group (http://www.baypiggies.net/) about my theater lighting project (http://light9.bigasterisk.com). Then I actually took off to do the theater lighting job, and only now do I have time to write about it.
Matt Harrison already gave a review of my talk http://panela.blog-city.com/drew_perttula.htm as did Dennis Reinhardt http://baypiggies.net/pipermail/baypiggies/2005-June/001026.html (followup at http://baypiggies.net/pipermail/baypiggies/2005-June/001029.html) and Ross Parlette http://baypiggies.net/pipermail/baypiggies/2005-June/001025.html
My talk is at http://darcs.bigasterisk.com/light9/doc/talk.py and it includes some ascii art I did with emacs artist-mode. Launch emacs, type M-x artist-mode and then you can draw things with LMB and change modes with MMB menu. The airbrush mode looks especially nice in syntax-highlighted python code, since it lays down a lot of hashes that turn red.
I was a bit worried about bringing such a specialized application to the piggies group. We normally talk about proper python language issues or more general app stuff, such as web interfaces. I've certainly enjoyed past special-topic presentations, though. In the past, we've had intros to wavelets, analyzing gene data, SNMP, and more. Anyway, I worried that there might not be enough interest in my project and that I'd have trouble keeping the audience entertained for two hours. Fortunately, the questions came quickly and often, which was lots of fun for me. We also ran well past 9:30, which I hope means other people were having a good time too.
Someone asked if I was paid for the project. I did get paid for my time in the theater, although that would have been the same regardless of whether or not my partner and I brought in our own control system or used the theater's own. All the rest of the software development is an unpaid open-source project.
Dennis mentioned the use of ctypes (or some other all-python interface) to access the parallel port that we use to talk to our DMX lighting control server. The proper way to do our parport access would be to use an appropriate linux driver that lets us drive the control pins arbitrarily. Maybe that's a common driver feature- I've never checked. Then our app work would consist merely of some open()s, write()s, and ioctls() which can all be done in python. In fact, I wrote long ago some swig code that uses low-level outb calls to talk to the port, and we haven't felt pressure to change it. Nowadays, there is some pressure to convert the hardware to usb so it can be used with more common laptops.
My final, open-ended topics were on how to do away with the awful system of manual saving and loading of data and on how to generalize my project into components and a 5GL that could be used to easily build a variety of related projects.
