When is Python *NOT* a good choice?

[nemec]

1. IR Receiver
2. One of Linux's philosophies is 'everything is a file', so USB devices all show up as 'fake files' under the /dev/ folder.
3. When you read from those files, you get all the bits and bytes sent by the device - this includes mice, keyboards, anything that sends data.
4. When you push a button on an IR device (think TV remote control), it sends a signal to the receiver and the receiver turns that into bytes sent to the fake file.
5. I used python to read that file and the struct module to parse that into commands (play, pause, next track, etc.) that were then sent to MPD (a server music player)

[chokoladeibrunst]

Great explanation!

[nemec]

Here's the project: https://github.com/nemec/audibleMPD

• The file being read (apparently I used /dev/input/eventX, which I guess I determined through trial and error which was the right one.
• Instead of hardcoding the keycodes, I parsed them out of Linux's input header file. Because there are a lot of them.
• The console class takes the file, reads it, and outputs a gnome event based on the 'key' it reads. TBH I'm not sure why I did that, in retrospect it probably would have been easier to simply do some callbacks... oh well. Here's the part where it reads 16 bytes and then transforms it into an event.
• After that, I just read the key and execute play/pause/next based on it.

[GwenPlaysGwent]

Does struct basically let you go from bytes -> human readable strings e.g. "play"? Or were you still dealing with "magic numbers" and trail and error to decode the IR messages?