The Project Hosting Odyssey

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I moved the hosting of my software projects again: from GitHub to bitbucket. My GitHub repositories will be available in the near future, but I will use bitbucket for development (until further notice ;-) ).

I must confess that I always used the free offers and never spent any money on project hosting. So I got a lot for free and should not complain. But all offers proved to be suboptimal or did not exist long enough to be a reliable platform.

After some self-hosted RCS,  CVS and SVN repositories (many years ago) I moved to Origo.ethz.ch. This pretty good service was closing after some years. One of my projects then moved to BerliOS. This service was announced to close as well, so I used this as a chance to switch to git and moved all my projects to GitHub.

After some time I needed a private repository for a closed-source project. Private repositories are not part of the free plan on GitHub, so I used bitbucket in parallel. Now that GitHub has decided to close the download area, I needed to find download hosting for packages. Instead of  using three different services I decided to move all my projects  to bitbucket today.

Some of my older projects (like Polygon) now outlived  a lot of different platforms and version control systems.

Polygon | new version 2.0.6 and 3.0.6

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Polygon logoI just released the new version of my packages for polygon handling with Python 2 and Python 3. There are only small changes, the most important ones are:

  1. moved development and downloads from GitHub to bitbucket after GitHub closed the download area,
  2. renamed the packages from Polygon to Polygon2 and Polygon3 to avoid confusion, especially on pypi,
  3. added a Douglas-Peucker simplification routine to Polygon3.

From now on I will implement new features in Polygon3 while Polygon2 will receive bugfixes only.

Binary packages for Windows will follow. I currently can't compile x64 binaries for Python 3.3 because neither my Visual Studio 2008 nor Visual Studio 2010 Express supports this. I would appreciate any help for this or the contribution of packages.

 

 

GitHub downloads closed

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My favourite development hoster GitHub has closed the download area for packages. Older uploads will be available for a while, but no new uploads are accepted. This was a bad decision, project hosting without a download area is not really attractive anymore!

I will check the different options to host packages for my projects. In the meantime everything will be available in my own download area.

One option is to move away from GitHub to bitbucket or a similar service.

DyMat | HDF5 export and other Modelica/Python projects

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DyMat_logoAfter the request of a user I added a very simple HDF5 export to my DyMat package. The code is already in the github repository and will be part of the next release.

If you are interested in the handling of Modelica simulations with Python you should also have a look at these packages:

Happy new year!

SunnyWebBox | version 0.3 with UDP and Python 3

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I've updated the code for my python package to communicate with a Sunny WebBox. The two most important changes of version 0.3 are:

  • support for UDP stream communication
  • support for python 3.x

The communication protocols are documented very poorly. I had to use trial-and-error a lot and collect information from different sources to get this working. The UDP-based protocol finally works but seems to be pretty weak.

The package is used for several months now to monitor a photovoltaic plant, but was still not tested with a wider range of devices. Use It with care!

Polygon | Douglas-Peucker and Future Development

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Polygon logoThe Polygon3 branch now includes an implementation of the Douglas-Peucker algorithm for line simplification by reducing the number of points. It is already included in the repository and will be part of the next release.

Now that python 3.3 is out I decided to focus much more on python-3. This has some impact on my development of python modules. Bugs in the Polygon2 branch (for python 2.x) will be fixed in the near future but new features will only be implemented in the Polygon3 branch.

Reading Buttons of a LCD Keypad with Arduino

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The LCD Keypad shield from dfrobot is a nice way to get a display and some buttons for an Arduino board. Unfortunately the reading of  button presses does not reliably work with the standard software (LCDKeypad). The alternative keygrabber library seems to be incomplete and did not work for me. The dfrobot forum lists some interesting approaches, so I decided to make my own library.

The LCDButtons library is hosted on github. It can be used as a replacement for LCDKeypad. The button() method works different: if a value is read that indicates a key press the reading is repeated until two consecutive values make the same key. The delay between the readings can be configured. Optionally the function can wait until the button is released.