hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr2963.txt

Episode: 2963
Title: HPR2963: A walk through my PifaceCAD Python code – Part 3
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2963/hpr2963.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 13:56:52

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This is HPR Episode 2963 for Wednesday 11th of December 2019.
Today's show is entitled, A Walk Through My Pipe Faced Cat Cold Part 3.
It's part of the series, a little bit of Python, and is hosted by MrX.
It's about 15 minutes long and carries an explicit flag.
The summary is, in this episode I cover functions,
activates it when a button is pushed on the Pipe Faced Cat Board.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by An Honesthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15.
That's HPR15.
Better web hosting that's Honest and Fair at An Honesthost.com.
And welcome Hacker Public Radio audience.
My name is MrX, and welcome to this podcast.
As usual, I'd like to start by thanking the people at HPR for making this service available
to us all.
It's Juliet and invaluable service and needs here into troops.
HPR is a community-led podcast provided by the community for the community.
That means you can contribute too.
I'm sure you must have something interesting we'd love to hear.
Well, I give it a go.
You might even enjoy it.
OK, in this episode, I'm continuing covering my Python script that I wrote for my PipeFace command
and display add-on board for my Raspberry Pi.
Hopefully this isn't boring you all to tears.
In this episode, I cover the functions that are controlled basically by the buttons on
the thing itself.
It's got buttons.
That's basically what I cover.
Anyway, here we go.
Sit back and enjoy.
So finally, we get on to the buttons.
Now, this is going to be a ridiculously long podcast, so I'm going to have to break this
up, I think, which would delight Kenneth Fallon.
So, def button zero, define button zero, button zero, that's a function, and that's the
very first button, bottom left hand corner.
If you push that, print, play slash pause button.
This prints a message to the LCD and toggles between play and pause for podcasts.
Then run it in it display to display available options.
Yeah, so I'll do that for podcasts.
I'll do a different thing for audiobooks and a different thing if you're on a system menu.
I haven't actually explained what does it, if it's in these other menus, but oh well,
there you go.
So, I've just lost my place here.
Button one, it's the track information button.
This message to LCD, then displays current, also track information, but it's information
about the current track that's playing.
So print message to LCD, then display current mock track information, such as the state
of mock p, current time, time left, so current time within the track, time left, current
playlist number, of total playlist number.
How many?
So you're in track two of 100 or something like that, you know?
And finally, track title, so yeah, so that's basically what that does.
It's quite a long, convoluted thing to pull all that information together.
I won't bore you with it.
I've got a, below the function, I've got an example output from mock p, so when you
do, I think it's mock p dash i, and it gives you information about the current track
for the state of mock, the file, the title, the artist, the song title, the album, total
time, time left, total set, current time, current set, bit rate, average bit rate, rate.
So I don't use all of those things, but I grab a, a, a, a pass bits from that, it comes
out of mock p, so yeah, that's, that's button, so my button one is it, yeah, which is actually
second button, because it starts at zero, so that's the second button along, third button
along, which is button two, just to confuse things, a previous track button, button is
only active if button is pushed twice within 0.3 seconds, this was added to stop moving
to new track by accidental pushing of button, if menu is 0 or 1, and value of variable time
if is less than 0.3, then print message to LCD and move to previous track and playlist,
if menu equals 2 and button pressed twice within 0.3 seconds, then display number of
HPR shows in the queue. All right, so that just, that just basically, so if you're in a system
menu and you, and you double tap this button, then it, it, it, it runs the command to show
how many, shows there's an queue basically, and if you're in a menu one or menu, menu, zero
or menu one, then it, it, it goes to the previous track, either in audio books or podcasts, so
yeah, button three, well that does the same, but it goes to the next track rather than
a previous track, and if you're in, if you're in a system menu, what does it do? Oh, but
button currently has no function if menu equals 2, I feel an assistant menu, which is menu
two, that does nothing. So menu zero is podcasts, menu one, it's audio books and menu two is system,
yeah. All right, button four, toggle backlight button, if first time button is pushed since power on,
then turn off Blinkstick and display main menu else, toggle LCD backlight between on and off,
so what this does is, when you first turn the device on, it runs a thing to check how many
shows are, how many shows are available in the HPR queue, and once it shows that, if you push this
fourth button, it's the fourth button along, on the bottom, along the bottom, sorry, fifth button,
it's button four, but it's a fifth button, because it goes zero, one, two, three, four, so fifth
button, if you push that one, and it's the first time the thing's been switched on, then it clears
the screen and takes you to the main menu, so it removes the number of shows and a queue message
basically, but if, once that's happened once, then the button has a different function after that,
what it does is it toggles the backlight on and off, so here that's that, so the next function,
mock seek, used to seek backwards or forward and track being played in mock p, seek position as a
global variable, when these terrible global variables, global variable used to store the current seek
position, its value changes up and down when using button six and seven, so yeah, so yeah,
it's just a function, but it isn't directly accessible from a button, it's just a function
called mock seek, that's right, so next button, button five, there's a kind of jog wheel at the top
of the device, and you can either push it to the left, it swings to the left, you can swing it to
the right, or you can push it down, so pushing it down is what they call button five, which is
actually the sixth button, remember, just to confuse things, so jog switch, this button is selected
by momentally pushing in the left right toggle button, just as I said, a button located
on top of unit, if menu equals zero or one has podcaster audio books, then if not in seek menu,
then display seek menu, if in seek menu, then jump forward or backward and track by the amount
currently displayed on the seek menu, this uses function mock seek, and if menu equals two,
system menu, then get date and time information, clear the screen, turn on LCD backlight,
print the shutdown message with the date and time info to LCD, and then issue the shutdown command,
so yeah, that's what that one does, button six, live jog switch, decrements through menus,
also used during seek, this button is selected by momentarily pushing the toggle switch to
the left, button located on top of unit, button only active if more than 0.3 seconds has passed
since it was last pushed, this was added to get around switch bounds, causing multiple jumps
in menu, think left and right jog switch is a bit noisy, if in seek menu seek, just in decrements
by one, until seek menu is reached and then returns to zero, each time the display is updated with
the decremented value stored in a dictionary seek display, if not in seek menu, menu decrements
down by one until menu min is reached, then rolls over to menu max, if in seek menu, session decrements
by one, if not in seek menu, menu decrements, oh I, yes, so basically if you're in a seek menu,
so you get into the seek menu by, right, let me explain how this works, so basically if you just
get the unit running and you push it to the left, then or left or right, then it goes up and down
the menus, you've got menu zero, menu one, menu two, as I said before, menu zero is audio is podcasts,
menu one is audio works, menu two is system, all right, if you push that this toggle switch in,
then it goes into seek menu, now if you use the left right toggle switch, rather than going through
the menus, it increases, increments are decrements, the amount of seek time you're going to seek in the
current track, and if you don't do anything to it and push it again, it comes out of that,
but if you, if you increment it or decrement it, then push the select button, then it'll jump
the track by that amount, basically, so that's how, how button six works, and button seven does
opposite, increments are supposed to decrements, so I won't go through that, print IR code,
use during debugging to get remote control working, came from pyface examples page,
print IR code, that's soft explanatory, IR play, if the play button is pushed on the remote control
twice within half a second, and if IR is active, then toggle backlight and toggle between play and pause,
okay, so that was you, play and pause, basically, but only if you've activated the IR, then through
the infrared sensor, which is somewhere else in here I suppose, IR info, if the info button
pause is pushed on the remote control twice within half a second, and if the IR is active,
then toggle backlight and display on the LCD information about the current track,
like the other one, it toggles backlight just to give you a visual cue that the remote controls
worked, basically, and you've got IR rewind, that rewind to track, IR forward, that forwards the track,
IR stop that, if the stop button is pushed on the remote control, and if IR is active, then
all right, the stop button just toggles backlight actually, and IR blue, right, so this is the thing that
activates the infrared sensor, so activate and deactivate and deactivate IR buttons on the remote
control, turns blinkstick on red when IR active, when blue button is pushed twice within half a
second on remote control, toggles backlight and display momentarily and display momentarily
message on LCD display, giving IR status, i.e. is the remote control buttons active or deactivate,
all remote buttons bar this one are affected, this feature was added to remotely disable all the
buttons, while using the TV remote control media buttons, these would sometimes fall so check
our things, the double push of the blue button within half a second was added as sometimes a
single push of it was acquired on my TV, and this would also force to activate things,
yeah, I really need to remote controls, feature added to check if our first pass is set to true,
i.e. backlight button 4 has not been pushed since boot, button 4 normally toggles backlight,
but turns off HPR QLED first time is pushed after boot, that's the other thing that happens, so
just to be a bit of a confusion there, that was an added feature,
must do the same thing is pushing the light button i guess, but that way you can do using the remote
control to clear the HPR Q screen, okay I think that's a convenient place to stop and hopefully
you have an all form of sleep, so if you want to contact me, I can be contacted at mrx at
hpr at googlemail.com, that's mrxathtpr theat symbol googlemail.com, so until next time thank you
goodbye
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