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Project Help and Ideas » trying to read data to led array from my machine

May 26, 2011
by numpskulls
numpskulls's Avatar

i got it all assembled and im up and working well with news feeds of my choice using python feed-reader.py | python serial-comm.py what i want to do now is read from a local window on my machine like the chat text or what ever gets put into a window cuz im just looking for more places to read from and send to the array. i tried putting the window into the rfeed-reader.py but it came back with a syntax error. any help or thoughts will be welcome and thanx in advance

May 26, 2011
by numpskulls
numpskulls's Avatar

i guess what im really asking now after an hour of messin around is "how do i get the led array to read my email or email allerts?" i thought somewhere it said this is possible but no address that i have enterd to the feed-reader has returned anything but an error. so im still stuck trying to find the proper syntax for local machine or localhost and/or my email.....where might be a place to go for these info's maybe if i found out how to display a digital clock i might be on my way......any ideas.......and as allways , thanx in advance

May 28, 2011
by hevans
(NerdKits Staff)

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Hi numpskulls,

Feedreader.py uses pythons urllib to read rss feeds from the internet and pass those to your LED Array. The examples on feedreader.py are all publicly available rss feeds on the internet, and if you find others you can certainly put those in, and they will be sent to your array.

Feedreader does not contain any magic to be able to read arbitrary windows off your PC (nor do I know of any software that does that). If you want that level of customization you will have to write the programs that do it yourself. Luckily the way you designed the array was modular enough to interface with a whole bunch of different systems. The serial_comm.py takes its input over the standard input. So for example you could write a quick pyhton (or other programming language) script to print out the current time, then pipe its output to serial_comm.py. Then the time would scroll by on your array.

Does that make sense?

Humberto

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