Instrumentino Notes

Draft

Just a draft working on it as of Oct 2016, check history to see if updated.

see also: Controlino Notes Instrumentino/Smart Terminal Challenge

What is Instrumentino

Links to what the authors think:

• https://github.com/yoelk/instrumentino

My Take

Instrumentino is an instrument control system designed to interface with various smart or semi smart systems. The actual sensors and actuators can be as simple as potentiometers, lm35, solar cells, relays..... . As a sort of glue there is some smart component ( beyond Instrumentino ) which, in the base case, is an Arduino running Controlino. Instrumentino can configure Controlino on the fly to interact with a large number of sensors/actuators.

Install

Misnomer I do not want to really install it I want to get it running in my Spyder environment. Russ's Computer Environment

This works

Download the file from github, the zip file. Unzip. Ignore a bunch of the stuff and take the

        \instrumentino
        from ( ........\instrumentino-master\instrumentino )
        and copy it to the place where your spyder projects live ( making a new project   instrumentino  )

Find the file:

         ......\SpyderP\instrumentino\__init__.py

and modify the top to:

         from __future__ import division
         
         import sys
         sys.path.append( ".." )
         
         #...... rest of file

This should make it run.

To do much more it seems you need an arduino.

Suggestions Remarks

Stuff from Russ, more as it occurs to me.

• Merge git hub for Instrumentino and Controlino. What is value of separate repositories, I do not see it.

• Is there doc for Controlino? I added just a bit at: Controlino Notes

• I like to keep my commands and responses short. Keeps speed up without high baud rates. Long wires need low baud rates. Really dislike xml idea. Would consider binary mode for time critical systems.

• Caps insensitivity is nice, but at high speeds is slower.

• Add a command to identify the software on the Arduino I use v for version, could be version, id..... My system responds something like "GreenHouse Sept04 2016" this way I can verify what I have connected to and that baud... is working.

• Looks like development is moving towards a new GUI. Consider making the GUI a snap in snap out replaceable componentl. Why Kivy, I can guess, but the fight to install might cool my jets.

• Do not make too monolithic, instead a family of applications not too tightly coupled.

Old Notes Ignore Until Properly Organized

On windows not going well

 C:\Users\Russ>pip install instrumentino
 Collecting instrumentino
   Using cached instrumentino-1.0.tar.gz
 Collecting wxPython (from instrumentino)
   Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement wxPython (from instrumentino) (from versions: )
 No matching distribution found for wxPython (from instrumentino)
 
 C:\Users\Russ>pip install wxPython
 Collecting wxPython
   Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement wxPython (from versions: )
 No matching distribution found for wxPython

=============

 C:\Users\Russ>pip install wxPython
 Collecting wxPython
   Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement wxPython (from versions: )
 No matching distribution found for wxPython
 
 C:\Users\Russ>pip install wxpython
 Collecting wxpython
   Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement wxpython (from versions: )
 No matching distribution found for wxpython

Well, not so bad. Useful to know that my Spyder already had wxpython, came with it or I installed, who knows. Also useful to know wxpython is called wx. This helps a lot.

Clean Install on Mint

Installed spyder

went to https://pypi.python.org/pypi/instrumentino link to git hub gave 404 search found https://github.com/yoelk/instrumentino

  using D:\_Source\Python\instremento\Using Instrumentino_v03.odt
  
  package manger wxpython

Documentation

• D:\_Source\Python\instremento\Using Instrumentino_v03 (1).odt on my system, not sure where I found it. Looks like from github below.
• Github Master for Instrumentino what other than code is there: Wiki, not yet. But Russ can edit it. In https://github.com/yoelk/instrumentino/tree/master/documents there are some good documents.
• Arduino Info

• [Youtube present]

Trying to Run

example_run_ArduinoPins.py on page 6/16

my was located at: D:\Russ\0000\SpyderP\instrumentino\instrumentino-master\documents\example_run_ArduinoPins.py\ArduinoPins.py

got errors until I added at top of file

1. russ add

import sys sys.path.append( r"D:/Russ/0000/SpyderP" )

1. end russ add

then it ran screen looked a lot like just running D:\Russ\0000\SpyderP\instrumentino\__init__.py

but what does it do. File Load Sequence and File Load Method -- cannot find any example files of these types and not sure what they should do

sequence browse also uncleare it is looking for *.mdt files which are ??

method actions, look like actions are built in -- what is time defaulting to 00:00:00 time as in time.time() or time in hr:min:sec from start of system or from clock

Structure of system based on ArduinoPins.py

Looks like your app is a descendant of Instrument ( from instrumentino import Instrument in __init.py__) which runs when it is created.

it is modified from the base by "addition" of comps, actions, version, name, description

this then is used to initialize InstrumentinoApp which looks like it is mostly the gui.

We do not seem to have python docs or unit tests to help inform us

what are actions? seem to be tuple of things like the one SysActionSetPins() look to see if it is based on abstract base. Descends from SysAction

SysAction from instrumentino.action import SysAction, SysActionParamTime, SysActionParamFloat, SysActionParamInt

class SysAction(RunnableItem): and RunnableItem from executable_listctrl import RunnableItem which is pretty much empty, this one seems to be an ABC but not declared to be so.

An architecture document would be nice, major classes, use of threads, mvc? GUI vs other components

Add a log file ?? where to capture exceptions, just use the console, if so advise.

Well things looked good but got

Traceback (most recent call last):

 File "D:/Russ/0000/SpyderP\instrumentino\__init__.py", line 155, in OnUpdateControls
   self.UpdateControls(event.data)
 File "D:/Russ/0000/SpyderP\instrumentino\__init__.py", line 180, in UpdateControls
   comp.Enable(cfg.IsCompOnline(comp))
 File "D:/Russ/0000/SpyderP\instrumentino\comp.py", line 236, in Enable
   self.panel.Enable(isEnabled)
 File "D:\apps\Anaconda\lib\site-packages\wx-3.0-msw\wx\_core.py", line 9971, in Enable
   return _core_.Window_Enable(*args, **kwargs)

TypeError: in method 'Window_Enable', expected argument 2 of type 'bool'

in the console

The system description file (e.g. mySystem.py) should include the following parts: imports -- there is no such file do you mean something like ArduinoPins.py