pyMCU test project looks like a Minecraft mob

pymcu-controlled-blockhead

Hackaday’s own [Jeremy Cook] has been testing out the pyMCU board and managed to put together an animated block head that looks like it could be a foe in Minecraft. That’s thanks mostly to the block of foam he’s using as a diffuser. The face of the project is a set of LEDs. These, along with the servo motors … Read the rest

Python can be your best friend when it comes to binary math

python-binary-math

If you’re into microcontrollers you know the ability to think and perform math in binary is a must. [Joe Ptiz] has been looking for a way to keep from being distract by the math when coding while still keeping the binary strings in the forefront of his mind. The solution he came up with is to use the Python interpreter Read the rest

Web scraping tutorial

web-scraping-tutorial

Web scraping is the act of programmatically harvesting data from a webpage. It consists of finding a way to format the URLs to pages containing useful information, and then parsing the DOM tree to get at the data. It’s a bit finicky, but our experience is that this is easier than it sounds. That’s especially true if you take some Read the rest

Forever.fm: Infinite Beat-matched Music

Forever.fm is [Peter]‘s combination of SoundCloud and The Echo Nest that plays a continuous stream of beat-matched music. The result is a web radio station that just keeps playing.

[Peter] provided a great write up on how he built the app. The server side is Python, using the Tornado web server and Tornadio2 + Socket.IO for handling live … Read the rest

Python script lets you monitor multiple serial devices at once

Not knowing what’s going on inside of your electronics projects can make it quite difficult to get the bugs out. [John] was bumping up against this problem when working on wireless communications between several devices. At just about the same time his friend came up with a script with lets you monitor multiple serial devices in one terminal window.… Read the rest

LED fun and Light Painting with the pyMCU

pymcu-led-pov-writing

Recently [Richard] at [pyMCU] was nice enough to send me one of their units to try out. As featured here before, this little board allows you to control physical things using your computer and the Python programming language. After evaluating it and making a LED blink, there were a couple other LED projects I wanted to try.

The … Read the rest

LEDs fade to the music using a Python filter

This little LED rig fades in time to music. The hardware itself is quite simple, some LEDs connected to the PWM pins of an Arduino. But the signal processing is happening on a computer using a Python script.

Many of the projects we see which pulse lights to music use the MSGEQ7 chip to perform hardware processing on the … Read the rest