plugandpie 0.1a7

Device driver and automation for common sensors

plugandpie was designed to automatically set up sensors with drivers, making the initial hardware configuration simpler and faster to implement. It is powered by community contributed drivers and it’s flexible enough to work with devices not yet directly supported. The package also aims to provide utilities for monitoring and analyzing sensors, so you can make software-level polling and set up complex observation models.

Driver Examples

By specifying directly the hardware interface and address, you have an unified access method for any register on the device.

accelerometer = GenericDriver(interface=SMBusAdapter(1), address=0x1D)
accelerometer.registers[0x2A].set(8)  # inactive
accelerometer.registers[0x0E].set(0)  # range = 2g
accelerometer.registers[0x2A].set(9)  # active, 800Hz

By reading a device configuration file that reflects its datasheet, you can have better namings for your registers.

# TODO

By instantiating the correct driver, a standardized API can provide the meaningful data easily.

accelerometer = MMA8452Q(interface=SMBusAdapter(1), address=0x1D)
accelerometer.get_ms2()

By reading a device configuration file, you can initialize all drivers immediately.

# TODO

Check out the documentation for examples of basic and advanced usages.

Monitor Examples

The most common uses of sensors is history analysis and real time telemetry. Both should seamlessly plug into plugandpie drivers, so the package includes some utilities for this purpose.

Installation:

plugandpie requires SMBus, which at this time has no good Python 3 implementation or bindings. A workaround can be found at https://procrastinative.ninja/2014/07/21/smbus-for-python34-on-raspberry/

Also, SMBus requires repeated starts in the i2c driver. This is not enabled by default on Raspberry Pi and can be fixed with:

echo -n 1 > /sys/module/i2c_bcm2708/parameters/combined

This configuration resets on boot, so make sure to put this in a startup script.

setup.sh is a script that contain a fix for both problems, but does so in an intrusive way. It is recommended for inexperienced users to install plugandpie for the first time, but experienced users should solve those problems individually.