[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htd3s50Zhk8]
[Pedram] Sent us his USB missile launcher interface project. He happened to have some of the USB missile launchers lying around. having lost their initial draw, he wanted to do something to spice it up. He wrote an interface in python so he could control the launcher via his iPhone. We don’t see how this is any different than controlling them by the computer, but he seems to have put a decent amount of work into it.
The fine folks at Midnight Research Labs have put together a new toy for you to play with. It’s a Python script that makes your WiFi hardware behave more like a theremin. Based on the pyaudio library it monitors the signal strength of the AP you’re connected to and changes the tone accordingly. There’s a sample embedded above (direct link). If you have a second interface, you can use it to modulate the volume. It’s an interesting trick, but they say that there’s enough latency that it would be hard to play actual music with it.
Python 3000 has officially been released. The final bug, Issue2306, “Update What’s new in 3.0” has been closed. Python 3000, py3k, Python 3.0, is a major release for the community. [Jeremy Hylton] pegs the earliest mention of the beast to January 2000. The new release has grown from PEP 3000, opened April 2006.
Py3k breaks backwards compatibility with previous releases in order to reduce feature duplication and promote one obvious way of getting things done. The first major change is that print is now a builtin function and not a statement. int and long have been unified, and integer division now returns a float. Py3k uses concepts of “text” and “data” instead of “Unicode strings” and “8-bit strings”. You can read about many of the changes in What’s New In Python 3.0. Some new features have been backported to Python 2.6 so you can start implementing them in your current code to ease the transition. 2.6 also has the -3 command line switch to warn you about features that are being removed or changed. Finally, the tool 2to3 is a source-to-source translator that should automate a lot of the changes.
Documentation for the new release is online. Source packages and binaries are available now.
[via johl]
This project provides LED feedback when an email is received. It uses a 4d-micro-USB module from Dontronics to interface serially and provide power to a Picaxe 08M. The PIC can control color and brightness of a RGB LED. The feedback is given by seven colors of the LED. The code is python script and picaxe basic, which he’s posted.
With the weather getting colder, [Daniel] decided it would be a good idea to monitor how much energy his gas heating was using in real time. He used a Nokia 6680 cameraphone to monitor the heater’s flame through the sight glass. PyS60, a Symbian implementation of Python, checks the image sent by the camera and measures how much blue flame is visible. These values are stored in a SQL DB on the phone that can be polled over Bluetooth. At the end of the billing cycle, he’ll be able to correlate the amount of gas used with what the phone reported.
[Thanks, florent bayle]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Fr65PFqfk]
[Cal Henderson] delivered a keynote titled Why I Hate Django at the first annual DjangoCon. Django is an open source BSD licensed web framework written in Python. Google has posted the keynote in its entirety to YouTube, which you can find embedded above. While the talk is humorous (and takes many jabs at Rails developers) it does provide insight into what makes a good web framework. [Cal] is Director of Engineering at Flickr and is an authority on how to make websites scale. He points out that most frameworks are designed to get projects off the ground quickly, but are lacking when it comes to building an even larger service. He talks about several things in Django that need work and improvements that could be made. It’s really an interesting look at what it takes to go big. Continue reading “Why I Hate Django”
More Wii Fit Balance Board hacks keep rolling in from Europe. We’re not sure we agree with [Juan Gonzales]’s assertion that the Wii Fit Balance board is the best way to control robots, but we can’t deny how fun it looks. [Gonzales] managed to control a robot of his own design with the balance board, making it turn when he leans to the sides and moving forward and back when he leans in those directions.
The robot, which he calls SkyBot, is fairly impressive in its own right, built from a PIC microcontroller and featuring various infrared sensors and 6 contact sensors. The robot’s OS can be controlled from Windows, OS X, or Linux, but for this project, they used Debian. The balance board interfaces with a laptop connected to SkyBot; custom software (tar.gz file) to make this work was written in python, and is available on [Gonzales]’s robot wiki, as well as instructions on how to build a SkyBot. It is in Spanish, however, so fire up Google Translate and get to work.
[via Balance Board Blog]
