Welcome to

Python The Complete Manual

Python is a versatile language and its rise in popularity is
certainly no surprise. Its similarity to everyday language has
made it a perfect companion for the Raspberry Pi, which
is often a first step into practical programming. But don’t
be fooled by its beginner-friendly credentials – Python has
plenty of more advanced functions. In this new edition,
you will learn how to program in Python, discover amazing
projects to improve your understanding, and find ways
to use Python to enhance your experience of computing.
You’ll also create fun projects including programming a
Space Invaders clone and building your own networked
Hi-Fi with Pi. Let’s get coding!
 Python The Complete Manual
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Python © 2016 Python Inc.

Python The Complete Manual Second Edition © 2016 Imagine Publishing Ltd

ISBN 978 1785 464 409

Part of the

bookazine series
Contents
What you can find inside the bookazine

Code
& create
with
Python!

6
 Get started
with
Python 8 Masterclass
Discover the basics of Python

Introducing Python Create with Python Use Python with Pi

26 Make web apps 80 Tic-tac-toe with Kivy 104 Using Python on Pi

Master this starter project Program a simple game Optimise your code
86 Make a Pong clone 110 Send an SMS
Enhance your game skills Combine Twilio and RasPi
114 Voice synthesizer
Use the eSpeak library
116 Visualise music
32 Build an app for Android in Minecraft
Take your apps on the move Code using PianoHAT
40 50 Python tips 88 Program a Space
Invaders clone 122 Code a Twitter bot
A selection of handy tips
Have fun with Pivaders Retweet automatically

Work with Python 98 Make a visual novel 124 Networked Hi-Fi

Tell a story using Python Listen to digital radio
50 Replace your shell
Say goodbye to Bash
58 Scientific computing
Discover NumPy’s power
64 Python for system admins
How to tweak your settings
72 Scrape Wikipedia
Start using Beautiful Soup

7
 Get with
started
Python
Always wanted to have a go at programming? No more
excuses, because Python is the perfect way to get started!
Python is a great programming language for both beginners and experts. It
is designed with code readability in mind, making it an excellent choice for
beginners who are still getting used to various programming concepts.
The language is popular and has plenty of libraries available, allowing
programmers to get a lot done with relatively little code.
You can make all kinds of applications in Python: you could use the
Pygame framework to write simple 2D games, you could use the GTK
libraries to create a windowed application, or you could try something
a little more ambitious like an app such as creating one using Python’s
Bluetooth and Input libraries to capture the input from a USB keyboard and
relay the input events to an Android phone.
For this tutorial we’re going to be using Python 2.x since that is the
version that is most likely to be installed on your Linux distribution.
In the following tutorials, you’ll learn how to create popular games using
Python programming. We’ll also show you how to add sound and AI to
these games.

8
Get started with Python Getting started

9
 Hello World
Let’s get stuck in, and what better way than with the programmer’s
best friend, the ‘Hello World’ application! Start by opening a terminal.
Its current working directory will be your home directory. It’s probably
a good idea to make a directory for the files that we’ll be creating in
this tutorial, rather than having them loose in your home directory.
You can create a directory called Python using the command mkdir
Python. You’ll then want to change into that directory using the
command cd Python.
The next step is to create an empty file using the command ‘touch’
followed by the filename. Our expert used the command touch
hello_world.py. The final and most important part of setting up the
file is making it executable. This allows us to run code inside the hello_
world.py file. We do this with the command chmod +x hello_world.
py. Now that we have our file set up, we can go ahead and open it up
in nano, or alternatively any text editor of your choice. Gedit is a great
editor with syntax highlighting support that should be available on any
distribution. You’ll be able to install it using your package manager if
you don’t have it already.

[liam@liam-laptop ~]$ mkdir Python

[liam@liam-laptop ~]$ cd Python/
[liam@liam-laptop Python]$ touch hello_world.py
[liam@liam-laptop Python]$ chmod +x hello_world.py
[liam@liam-laptop Python]$ nano hello_world.py

Our Hello World program is very simple, it only needs two lines.
The first line begins with a ‘shebang’ (the symbol #! – also known

10
 Get started with Python Getting started

as a hashbang) followed by the path to the Python interpreter. The

program loader uses this line to work out what the rest of the lines Tip
need to be interpreted with. If you’re running this in an IDE like IDLE, If you were using a graphical
you don’t necessarily need to do this. editor such as gedit, then you
would only have to do the
The code that is actually read by the Python interpreter is only a last step of making the file
single line. We’re passing the value Hello World to the print function by executable. You should only have
to mark the file as executable
placing it in brackets immediately after we’ve called the print function. once. You can freely edit the file
Hello World is enclosed in quotation marks to indicate that it is a literal once it is executable.
value and should not be interpreted as source code. As we would
expect, the print function in Python prints any value that gets passed
to it from the console.
You can save the changes you’ve just made to the file in nano using
the key combination Ctrl+O, followed by Enter. Use Ctrl+X to exit nano.

#!/usr/bin/env python2
print(“Hello World”)

You can run the Hello World program by prefixing

its filename with ./ – in this case you’d type:
./hello_world.py.

[liam@liam-laptop Python]$ ./hello_world.py

Hello World

Variables and data types

A variable is a name in source code that is associated with an area in
memory that you can use to store data, which is then called upon
throughout the code. The data can be one of many types, including:

Integer Stores whole numbers

Float Stores decimal numbers
Boolean Can have a value of True or False
String Stores a collection of characters. “Hello World” is a
string

“A variable is associated with an area in

memory that you can use to store data”
11
 Getting started Get started with Python

As well as these main data types, there are sequence types (technically,
Tip a string is a sequence type but is so commonly used we’ve classed it
At this point, it’s worth explaining as a main data type):
that any text in a Python file
that follows a # character will be
ignored by the interpreter. This List Contains a collection of data in a specific order
is so you can write comments in
your code. Tuple Contains a collection immutable data in a specific
order

A tuple would be used for something like a co-ordinate, containing

an x and y value stored as a single variable, whereas a list is typically
used to store larger collections. The data stored in a tuple is immutable
because you aren’t able to change values of individual elements in a
tuple. However, you can do so in a list.
It will also be useful to know about Python’s dictionary type. A
dictionary is a mapped data type. It stores data in key-value pairs.
This means that you access values stored in the dictionary using that
value’s corresponding key, which is different to how you would do it
with a list. In a list, you would access an element of the list using that
element’s index (a number representing where the element is placed
in the list).
Let’s work on a program we can use to demonstrate how to use
variables and different data types. It’s worth noting at this point that
you don’t always have to specify data types in Python. Feel free to
create this file in any editor you like. Everything will work just fine as
long as you remember to make the file executable. We’re going to call
ours variables.py.

Interpreted vs compiled languages

An interpreted language compiled language such as

such as Python is one C, where the source code is
where the source code only converted to machine
is converted to machine code once – the resulting
code and then executed machine code is then
each time the program executed each time the
runs. This is different from a program runs.

12
 Get started with Python Getting started

Full code listing

#!/usr/bin/env python2

# We create a variable by writing the name of the

The following line creates variable we want followed# by an equals sign,
an integer variable called which is followed by the value we want to store
hello_int with the # in the# variable. For example, the following line
value of 21. Notice how creates a variable called# hello_str, containing the
it doesn’t need to go in string Hello World.
quotation marks hello_str = “Hello World”

The same principal is hello_int = 21

true of Boolean values
hello_bool = True
We create a tuple in
the following way hello_tuple = (21, 32)

hello_list = [“Hello,”, “this”, “is”,

And a list in this way “a”, “list”]

# This list now contains 5 strings. Notice that

there are no spaces# between these strings so if
you were to join them up so make a sentence #
you’d have to add a space between each element.

You could
hello_list = list()
also create the
hello_list.append(“Hello,”)
same list in the
hello_list.append(“this”)
following way
hello_list.append(“is”)
hello_list.append(“a”)
hello_list.append(“list”)

# The first line creates an empty list and the

following lines use the append# function
of the list type to add elements to the
list. This way of using a# list isn’t
really very useful when working
with strings you know of in
# advance, but it can be
useful when working with
dynamic data such as
user# input. This list
will overwrite the
first list without
any warning

13
Getting started Get started with Python

We might as well as we# are using the same variable name as the
create a dictionary previous list.
while we’re at it.
Notice how we’ve hello_dict = { “first_name” : “Liam”,
aligned the colons “last_name” :
below to make the “Fraser”,
code tidy “eye_colour” : “Blue” }

# Let’s access some elements inside our

collections# We’ll start by changing the value
of the last string in our hello_list and# add an
exclamation mark to the end. The “list” string is
the 5th element # in the list. However, indexes
in Python are zero-based, which means the
# first element has an index of 0.
Notice that there
print(hello_list[4])
will now be two
hello_list[4] += “!”
exclamation marks
# The above line is the same as
present when we
hello_list[4] = hello_list[4] + “!”
print the element
print(hello_list[4])

Remember
that tuples are print(str(hello_tuple[0]))
immutable, # We can’t change the value of those elements
although we like we just did with the list
can access the # Notice the use of the str function above to
elements of them explicitly convert the integer
like so # value inside the tuple to a string before
printing it.
Let’s create a
sentence using
the data in our print(hello_dict[“first_name”] + “ “ + hello_
hello_dict dict[“last_name”] + “ has “ +
hello_dict[“eye_colour”] + “ eyes.”)
A much tidier way
of doing this would
be to use Python’s print(“{0} {1} has {2} eyes.”.format(hello_
string formatter dict[“first_name”],
hello_dict[“last_name”],
hello_dict[“eye_colour”]))

14
 Get started with Python Getting started

Indentation in detail

As previously mentioned, essential to use a consistent

the level of indentation indentation style. Four
dictates which statement a spaces are typically used to
block of code belongs to. represent a single level of
Indentation is mandatory indentation in Python. You
in Python, whereas in other can use tabs, but tabs are
languages, sets of braces not well defined, especially if
are used to organise code you open a file in more than
blocks. For this reason, it is one editor.

Control structures
In programming, a control structure is any kind of statement that can
change the path that the code execution takes. For example, a control
structure that decided to end the program if a number was less than 5
would look something like this:

#!/usr/bin/env python2
import sys # Used for the sys.exit function
int_condition = 5
if int_condition < 6:
sys.exit(“int_condition must be >= 6”)
else:
print(“int_condition was >= 6 - continuing”)

The path that the code takes will depend on the value of
the integer int_condition. The code in the ‘if’ block will only be
executed if the condition is true. The import statement is used to
load the Python system library; the latter provides the exit function,
allowing you to exit the program, printing an error message. Notice
that indentation (in this case four spaces per indent) is used to indicate
which statement a block of code belongs to. ‘If’ statements are
probably the most commonly used control structures. Other control

“The path the code takes will depend on

the value of the integer int_condition”
15
Getting started (FU
TUBSUFE
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1ZUIPO

structures include: the following items which you should be aware of

when using Python:
t

'PS
TUBUFNFOUT
XIJDI
BMMPX
ZPV
UP
JUFSBUF
PWFS
JUFNT
JO

DPMMFDUJPOT
PS
UP
SFQFBU
B
QJFDF
PG
DPEF
BHBJO
B
DFSUBJO
OVNCFS

PG
UJNFT
t

8IJMF
TUBUFNFOUT
B
MPPQ
UIBU
DPOUJOVFT
XIJMF
UIF
DPOEJUJPO

JT
USVF
We’re going to write a program that accepts user input from the
user to demonstrate how control structures work. We’re calling it
construct.py. The ‘for’ loop is using a local copy of the current value,
which means any changes inside the loop won’t make any changes
affecting the list. On the other hand however, the ‘while’ loop is
directly accessing elements in the list, so you could change the list
there should you want to do so. We will talk about variable scope in
some more detail later on in the article. The output from the above
program is as follows:

[liam@liam-laptop Python]$ ./
construct.py
How many integers? acd
You must enter an integer

[liam@liam-laptop Python]$ ./
construct.py
How many integers? 3
Please enter integer 1: t
You must enter an integer
Please enter integer 1: 5
Please enter integer 2: 2
Please enter integer 3: 6
Using a for loop
5
2
6
Using a while loop
5
2
6

“The ‘for‘ loop uses a local copy, so

changes in the loop won’t affect the list”
16
 Work with Python Practical Python tips and projects

Work with Python

With a more solid understanding of Python, you can really begin to
make it work for you. It is a highly functional and versatile language,
and in this section, we’ll show you how to use this versatility in your
own projects. First, we’ll show you how to ditch the primary shell
and replace it using Python (p.50), then look at how NumPy can
help with scientific computing (p.58). We’ll also look at how Python
can help with system administration (p.64), and how you can use it
with Beautiful Soup to read Wikipedia offline (p.72). Get ready to use
Python to its full potential.

48
Practical Python tips and projects Work with Python

49
 Work with Python Replace your shell with Python

What you’ll need…

Python
www.python.org/doc
Replace your shell
with Python
Python is a great programming language, but did
you know it can even replace your primary shell?
We all use shell on a daily basis. For most of us, shell is the gateway into
our Linux system. For years and even today, Bash has been the default
shell for Linux. But it is getting a bit long in the tooth.
No need to be offended: we still believe Bash is the best shell out
there when compared to some other UNIX shells such as Korn Shell
(KSH), C Shell (CSH) or even TCSH.
This tutorial is not about Bash being incapable, but it is about
how to breathe completely new life into the shell to do old things
conveniently and new things which were previously not possible, even
by a long shot. So, without further delay, let’s jump in.
While the Python programming language may require you to write
longer commands to accomplish a task (due to the way Python’s
modules are organised), this is not something to be particularly
concerned about. You can easily write aliases to the equivalent of the
Bash command that you intend to replace. Most of the time there
will be more than one way to do a thing, but you will need to decide
which way works best for you.
Python provides support for executing system commands directly
(via the os or subprocess module), but where possible we will focus
on Python-native implementations here, as this allows us to develop
portable code.

SECTION 1: Completing basic shell tasks in Python

1. File management
The Python module shutil provides support for file and directory
operations. It provides support for file attributes, directory copying,
archiving etc. Let’s look at some of its important functions.

shutil module

50
 Replace your shell with Python Work with Python

copy (src,dst): Copy the src file to the destination directory. In this
mode permissions bits are copied but metadata is not copied.
copy2 (src,dst): Same as copy() but also copies the metadata.
copytree(src, dst[, symlinks=False[, ignore=None]]): This is
similar to ‘cp -r’, it allows you to copy an entire directory.
ignore_patterns (*patterns): ignore_patterns is an interesting
function that can be used as a callable for copytree(), it allows you to
ignore files and directories specified by the glob-style patterns.
rmtree(path[, ignore_errors[, onerror]]): rmtree() is used to
delete an entire directory.
move(src,dst): Similar to mv command it allows you to recessively
move a file or directory to a new location.

Example:
from shutil import copytree, ignore_patterns
copytree(source, destination, ignore=ignore_patterns(‘*. Above You may never need to use Bash
pyc’, ‘tmp*’)) again, with some dedicated Python
modules at hand

make_archive(base_name, format[, root_dir[, base_dir[,

verbose[, dry_run[, owner[, group[, logger]]]]]]]: Think of
this as a replacement for tar, zip, bzip etc. make_archive() creates an
archive file in the given format such as zip, bztar, tar , gztar. Archive
support can be extended via Python modules.

Example
from shutil import make_archive
import os
archive_name = os.path.expanduser(os.path.join(‘~’,
‘ludarchive’))
root_dir = os.path.expanduser(os.path.join(‘~’, ‘.ssh’))
make_archive(archive_name, ‘gztar’, root_dir)

‘/Users/kunal/ludarchive.tar.gz’

2. Interfacing operating system & subprocesses

Python provides two modules to interface with the OS and to manage
processes, called os and subprocess. These modules let you interact
with the core operating system shell, and work with the environment,
processes, users and file descriptors. The subprocess module was
introduced to support better management of subprocesses (paalready
51
Work with Python Replace your shell with Python

in Python and is aimed to replace os.system, os.spawn*, os.popen,

popen2.* and commands.* modules.

os module
environ: environment represents the OS environment variables in a
string object.

Example:
import os
os.environ

{‘VERSIONER_PYTHON_PREFER_32_BIT’: ‘no’, ‘LC_CTYPE’: ‘UTF-

8’, ‘TERM_PROGRAM_VERSION’: ‘297’, ‘LOGNAME’: ‘kunaldeo’,
‘USER’: ‘kunaldeo’, ‘PATH’: ‘/System/Library/Frameworks/
Python.framework/Versions/2.7/bin:/Users/kunaldeo/narwhal/
bin:/opt/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/
sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/X11/bin:/opt/local/bin:/Applications/
MOTODEV_Studio_For_Android_2.0.0_x86/android_sdk/tools:/
Applications/MOTODEV_Studio_For_Android_2.0.0_x86/android_sdk/
platform-tools:/Volumes/CyanogenModWorkspace/bin’, ‘HOME’:
‘/Users/kunaldeo’, ‘PS1’: ‘\\[\\e[0;32m\\]\\u\\[\\e[m\\] \\
[\\e[1;34m\\]\\w\\[\\e[m\\] \\[\\e[1;32m\\]\\$\\[\\e[m\\] \\
[\\e[1;37m\\]’, ‘NARWHAL_ENGINE’: ‘jsc’, ‘DISPLAY’: ‘/tmp/launch-
s2LUfa/org.x:0’, ‘TERM_PROGRAM’: ‘Apple_Terminal’, ‘TERM’:
‘xterm-color’, ‘Apple_PubSub_Socket_Render’: ‘/tmp/launch-
kDul5P/Render’, ‘VERSIONER_PYTHON_VERSION’: ‘2.7’, ‘SHLVL’: ‘1’,
‘SECURITYSESSIONID’: ‘186a5’, ‘ANDROID_SDK’: ‘/Applications/
MOTODEV_Studio_For_Android_2.0.0_x86/android_sdk’,’_’: ‘/System/
Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/bin/python’,
‘TERM_SESSION_ID’: ‘ACFE2492-BB5C-418E-8D4F-84E9CF63B506’,
‘SSH_AUTH_SOCK’: ‘/tmp/launch-dj6Mk4/Listeners’, ‘SHELL’: ‘/bin/
bash’, ‘TMPDIR’: ‘/var/folders/6s/pgknm8b118737mb8psz8x4z80000
gn/T/’, ‘LSCOLORS’: ‘ExFxCxDxBxegedabagacad’, ‘CLICOLOR’: ‘1’,
‘__CF_USER_TEXT_ENCODING’: ‘0x1F5:0:0’, ‘PWD’: ‘/Users/kunaldeo’,
‘COMMAND_MODE’: ‘unix2003’}

You can also find out the value for an environment value:

os.environ[‘HOME’]
‘/Users/kunaldeo’
52
 Replace your shell with Python Work with Python

putenv(varname,value) : Adds or sets an environment variable with

the given variable name and value.
getuid() : Return the current process’s user id.
getlogin() : Returns the username of currently logged in user
getpid(pid) : Returns the process group id of given pid. When used
without any parameters it simply returns the current process id.
getcwd() : Return the path of the current working directory.
chdir(path) : Change the current working directory to the given path.
listdir(path) : Similar to ls, returns a list with the content of
directories and file available on the given path.

Example:
os.listdir(“/home/homer”)

[‘.gnome2’, ‘.pulse’, ‘.gconf’, ‘.gconfd’, ‘.beagle’,

‘.gnome2_private’, ‘.gksu.lock’, ‘Public’, ‘.ICEauthority’,
‘.bash_history’, ‘.compiz’, ‘.gvfs’, ‘.update-notifier’,
‘.cache’, ‘Desktop’, ‘Videos’, ‘.profile’, ‘.config’, ‘.esd_
auth’, ‘.viminfo’, ‘.sudo_as_admin_successful’, ‘mbox’,
‘.xsession-errors’, ‘.bashrc’, ‘Music’, ‘.dbus’, ‘.local’,
‘.gstreamer-0.10’, ‘Documents’, ‘.gtk-bookmarks’, ‘Downloads’,
‘Pictures’, ‘.pulse-cookie’, ‘.nautilus’, ‘examples.desktop’,
‘Templates’, ‘.bash_logout’]

mkdir(path[, mode]) : Creates a directory with the given path with

the numeric code mode. The default mode is 0777.
makedirs(path[, mode]) : Creates given path (inclusive of all its
directories) recursively. The default mode is 0777. :

Example:
import os
path = “/home/kunal/greatdir”
os.makedirs( path, 0755 );

rename (old,new) : The file or directory “old” is renamed to “new” If

“new” is a directory, an error will be raised. On Unix and Linux, if “new”
exists and is a file, it will be replaced silently if the user has permission
to do so.

Above A screenshot of the IPython Gt

renames (old,new) : Similar to rename but also creates any directories console with GUI capabilities

53
 Work with Python Replace your shell with Python

recessively if necessary.

rmdir(path) : Remove directory from the path mentioned. If the path

already has files you will need to use shutil.rmdtree()

subprocess:

call(*popenargs, **kwargs) : Runs the command with arguments.

On process completion it returns the returncode attribute.

Example:
import subprocess
print subprocess.call([“ls”,”-l”])

total 3684688
drwx------+ 5 kunaldeo staff 170 Aug 19 01:37 Desktop
drwx------+ 10 kunaldeo staff 340 Jul 26 08:30
Documents
drwx------+ 50 kunaldeo staff 1700 Aug 19 12:50
Downloads
drwx------@ 127 kunaldeo staff 4318 Aug 19 01:43 Dropbox
drwx------@ 42 kunaldeo staff 1428 Aug 12 15:17 Library
drwx------@ 3 kunaldeo staff 102 Jul 3 23:23 Movies
drwx------+ 4 kunaldeo staff 136 Jul 6 08:32 Music
drwx------+ 5 kunaldeo staff 170 Aug 12 11:26 Pictures
drwxr-xr-x+ 5 kunaldeo staff 170 Jul 3 23:23 Public
-rwxr-xr-x 1 kunaldeo staff 1886555648 Aug 16 21:02
androidsdk.tar
drwxr-xr-x 5 kunaldeo staff 170 Aug 16 21:05 sdk
drwxr-xr-x 19 kunaldeo staff 646 Aug 19 01:47 src
-rw-r--r-- 1 root staff 367 Aug 16 20:36
umbrella0.log

STD_INPUT_HANDLE: The standard input device. Initially, this is the

console input buffer.
Above IPython previously offered a STD_OUTPUT_HANDLE: The standard output device. Initially, this is the
notebook feature, enabling users to create
HTML documents where images, code active console screen buffer.
and mathematical formulae were correctly
formatted. This has since been split off into STD_ERROR_HANDLE: The standard error device. Initially, this is the active
a separate (but tightly integrated) service
called Jupyter console screen buffer.
54
 Replace your shell with Python Work with Python

SECTION 2: IPython: a ready-made Python system

shell replacement

In section 1 we have introduced you to the Python modules which

allow you to do system shell-related tasks very easily using vanilla
Python. Using the same features, you can build a fully featured shell
and remove a lot of Python boilerplate code along the way. However,
if you are kind of person who wants everything ready-made, you are in
luck. IPython provides a powerful and interactive Python shell which
you can use as your primary shell. IPython supports Python 2.6 to 2.7
and 3.1 to 3.2 . It supports two type of Python shells: Terminal based
and Qt based.
Just to reiterate, IPython is purely implemented in Python and
provides a 100% Python-compliant shell interface, so everything that
you have learnt in section 1 so far can be run inside IPython without
any problems.
IPython is already available in most Linux distributions. Search your
distro’s repositories to look for it. In case you are not able to find it, you
can also install it using easy_install or PyPI.
IPython provides a lot of interesting features which makes it a great
shell replacement…

Tab completion: Tab completion provides an excellent way to explore

any Python object that you are working with. It also helps you to avoid
making typos.

Example :
In [3]: import o {hit tab}
objc opcode operator optparse os os2emxpath

In [3]: import os

In [4]: os.p {hit tab}

os.pardir os.pathconf_names os.popen os.popen4
os.path os.pathsep os.popen2 os.putenv
os.pathconf os.pipe os.popen3

Built In Object Explorer: You can add ‘?’ after any Python object
to view its details such as Type, Base Class, String Form, Namespace, File
and Docstring.
55
Work with Python Replace your shell with Python

Example:
In [28]: os.path?
Type: module
Base Class: <type ‘module’>
String Form:<module ‘posixpath’ from ‘/System/Library/
Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/
posixpath.pyc’>
Namespace: Interactive
File: /System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/
Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/posixpath.py
Docstring:
Common operations on POSIX pathnames.

Instead of importing this module directly, import os and refer to this

module as os.path. The ‘os.path’ name is an alias for this module on
POSIX systems; on other systems (eg Mac, Windows), os.path provides
the same operations in a manner specific to that platform, and is an
alias to another module (eg macpath, ntpath).
Some of this can actually be useful on non-POSIX systems too, eg for
manipulation of the pathname component of URLs. You can also use
double question marks (??) to view the source code for the relevant object.

Magic functions: IPython comes with a set of predefined ‘magic

functions’ that you can call with a command-line-style syntax. IPython
‘magic’ commands are conventionally prefaced by %, but if the flag
%automagic is set to on, then you can call magic commands without
the %. To view a list of available magic functions, use ‘magic function
%lsmagic’. They include functions that work with code such as %run,
%edit, %macro, %recall etc; functions that affect shell such as %colors,
%xmode, %autoindent etc; and others such as %reset, %timeit, %paste
etc. Most cool features of IPython are powered using magic functions.

Example:
In [45]: %lsmagic
Available magic functions:
%alias %autocall %autoindent %automagic %bookmark %cd
%colors %cpaste %debug %dhist %dirs %doctest_mode %ed
%edit %env %gui %hist %history %install_default_config
%install_profiles %load_ext %loadpy %logoff %logon
%logstart %logstate %logstop %lsmagic %macro %magic
56
 Replace your shell with Python Work with Python

%page %paste %pastebin %pdb %pdef %pdoc %pfile

%pinfo %pinfo2 %popd %pprint %precision %profile %prun
%psearch %psource %pushd %pwd %pycat %pylab %quickref
%recall %rehashx %reload_ext %rep %rerun %reset
%reset_selective %run %save %sc %sx %tb %time %timeit
%unalias %unload_ext %who %who_ls %whos %xdel %xmode

Automagic is OFF, % prefix IS needed for magic functions. To view help

on any Magic Function, call ‘%somemagic?’ to read its docstring.
Python script execution and runtime code editing: You can use %run
to run any Python script. You can also control-run the Python script with
pdb debugger using -d, or pdn profiler using -p. You can also edit a
Python script using the %edit command which opens the given Python
script in the editor defined by the $EDITOR environment variable.

Shell command support: To just run a shell command, prefix the

command with ! .

Example :
In [5]: !ps
PID TTY TIME CMD
4508 ttys000 0:00.07 -bash
84275 ttys001 0:00.03 -bash
17958 ttys002 0:00.18 -bash

In [8]: !clang prog.c -o prog Conclusion

prog.c:2:1: warning: type specifier missing, defaults to As you can see, it’s easy to
‘int’ [-Wimplicit-int] tailor Python for all your shell
environment needs. Python
main() modules like os, subprocess
^~~~ and shutil are available at
your disposal to do just about
1 warning generated. everything you need using
Python. IPython turns this whole
experience into an even more
Qt console : IPython comes with a Qt-based console. This provides complete package. You get
features only available in a GUI, like inline figures, multiline editing with to do everything a standard
Python shell does and with
syntax highlighting, and graphical calltips. Start the Qt console with: much more convenient features.
IPython’s magic functions really
do provide a magical Python
$ ipython qtconsole shell experience. So next time
you open a Bash session, think
again: why settle for gold when
If you get errors about missing modules, ensure that you have installed platinum is a step away?
dependent packages – PyQt, pygments, pyexpect and ZeroMQ.
57
 Work with Python Scientific computing with NumPy

What you’ll need…

NumPy
www.numpy.org
Scientific
SciPy
www.scipy.org

Matplotlib
www.matplotlib.org
computing
with NumPy
Make some powerful calculations with NumPy,
SciPy and Matplotlib
NumPy is the primary Python package for performing scientific
computing. It has a powerful N-dimensional array object, tools
for integrating C/C++ and Fortran code, linear algebra, Fourier
transform, and random number capabilities, among other things.
NumPy also supports broadcasting, which is a clever way for
universal functions to deal in a meaningful way with inputs that do
not have exactly the same form.
Apart from its capabilities, the other advantage of NumPy is that it
can be integrated into Python programs. In other words, you may
get your data from a database, the output of another program, an
external file or an HTML page and then process it using NumPy.
This article will show you how to install NumPy, make calculations,
plot data, read and write external files, and it will introduce you to
some Matplotlib and SciPy packages that work well with NumPy.
NumPy also works with Pygame, a Python package for creating
games, though explaining its use is unfortunately beyond of the
scope of this article.
It is considered good practice to try the various NumPy
commands inside the Python shell before putting them into
Python programs. The examples in this article use either Python
shell or iPython.

“Apart from its capabilities, the other

advantage of NumPy is that it can be
integrated into Python programs”

58
 Scientific computing with NumPy Work with Python

A simple Python Matplotlib

program for generated output
Polynomial Fitting

A Python script Finding help

that uses SciPy to is easy
process an image

Installing NumPy >>> ... [3,3,3],

... [-1,-0.5,4],
Not only have you found the NumPy ... [0,1,0]] )
01 Most Linux distributions have a
ready-to-install package you can
use. After installation, you can find out
version but you also know that NumPy
is properly installed.
You can also create arrays with some
more dimensions.
the NumPy version you are using by
executing the following: About NumPy Making simple calculations
using NumPy
$ python
Python 2.7.3 (default, Mar 13 02 Despite its simplistic name,
NumPy is a powerful Python
package that is mainly for working
2014, 11:03:55)
[GCC 4.7.2] on linux2
Type “help”, “copyright”,
with arrays and matrices. There are
many ways to create an array but the
03 Given an array named myArray,
you can find the minimum and
maximum values in it by executing the
“credits” or “license” for simplest one is to make use of the following commands:
more information. array() function:
>>> numpy.version.version >>> myArray.min()
Traceback (most recent call >>> oneD = array([1,2,3,4]) >>> myArray.max()
last):
File “<stdin>”, line 1, in The aforementioned command Should you wish to find the mean value
<module> creates a one-dimensional array. If you of all array elements, you can run the
NameError: name ‘numpy’ isnot want to create a two-dimensional next command:
defined array, you can use the array() function
>>> import numpy as follows: >>> myArray.mean()
>>> numpy.version.version
‘1.6.2’ >>> twoD = array([ [1,2,3], Similarly, you can find the median of the

59
 Work with Python Scientific computing with NumPy

“When you apply

a function to an
array, the function
is automatically
applied to all of the
array elements”
a file. If you have an array variable
named aa1, you can easily save its
contents into a file called aa1.txt by
using the following command:
array by running the following
Python command:
Reading files In [17]: np.savetxt(“aa1.txt”,
aa1)
>>> median(myArray)
05 Imagine that you have just
extracted information from an
Apache log file using AWK and you
As you can easily imagine, you can
The median value of a set is an element read the contents of aa1.txt later by
that divides the data set into two now want to go and process the text using the loadtxt() function.
subsets (left and right subsets) with the file using NumPy.
same number of elements. If the data The following AWK code finds out Common functions
set has an odd number of elements, the total number of requests per hour:
then the median is part of the data set.
On the other side, if the data set has an
even number of elements, then the
$ cat access.log | cut -d[
-f2 | cut -d] -f1 | awk -F:
07 NumPy supports many
numerical and statistical
functions. When you apply a function
median is the mean value of the two ‘{print $2}’ | sort -n | uniq to an array, the function is then
centre elements of the sorted data set. -c | awk ‘{print $2, $1}’ > automatically applied to all of the
timeN.txt array elements.
When working with matrices, you
The format of the text file (timeN.txt) can find the inverse of a matrix AA
Using arrays with NumPy with the data is the following: by typing “AA.I”. You can also find
its eigenvalues by typing “np.linalg.
04 NumPy not only embraces
the indexing methods used
in typical Python for strings and lists
00
01
191
225
eigvals(AA)” and its eigenvector by
typing “np.linalg.eig(BB)”.
02 121
but also extends them. If you want to 03 104
select a given element from an array, Working with matrices
you can use the following notation: Reading the timeN.txt file and

>>> twoD[1,2]
assigning it to a new array variable can
be done as follows: 08 A special subtype of a two-
dimensional NumPy array is
a matrix. A matrix is like an array except
You can also select a part of an array (a aa = np.loadtxt(“timeN.txt”) that matrix multiplication replaces
slice) using the following notation: element-by-element multiplication.
Matrices are generated using
>>> twoD[:1,1:3] Writing to files the matrix (or mat) function as follows:

Finally, you can convert an array into a

Python list using the tolist() function. 06 Writing variables to a file
is largely similar to reading
In [2]: AA = np.mat(‘0 1 1; 1
1 1; 1 1 1’)

60
 Scientific computing with NumPy Work with Python

You can add matrices named AA and dependencies that you should
BB by typing AA + BB. Similarly, you also install. The first thing you will
can multiply them by typing AA * BB. learn is how to plot a polynomial “Try the various
Plotting with Matplotlib
function. The necessary commands
for plotting the 3x^2-x+1 NumPy
polynomial are the following: commands inside
09 The first move you should
make is to install Matplotlib.
As you can see, Matplotlib has many
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot
the Python shell”
61
 Work with Python Scientific computing with NumPy

as plt one small part of the scipy.stats Using SciPy for

myPoly = np.poly1d(np. package about statistics.
array([3, -1, 1]). image processing
astype(float)) In [36]: from scipy.stats
x = np.linspace(-5, 5, 100)
y = myPoly(x)
plt.xlabel(‘x values’)
import poisson, lognorm
In [37]: mySh = 10;
In [38]: myMu = 10;
11 Now we will show you how
to process and transform a
PNG image using SciPy. The most
plt.ylabel(‘f(x) values’) In [39]: ln = important part of the code is the
xticks = np.arange(-5, 5, 10) lognorm(mySh) following line:
yticks = np.arange(0, 100, In [40]: p = poisson(myMu)
10) In [41]: ln.rvs((10,)) image = np.array(Image.
plt.xticks(xticks) Out[41]: open(‘SA.png’).convert(‘L’))
plt.yticks(yticks) array([ 9.29393114e-
plt.grid(True) 02, 1.15957068e+01, This line allows you to read a usual
plt.plot(x,y) 9.78411983e+01, PNG file and convert it into a NumPy
8.26370734e- array for additional processing. The
The variable that holds the 07, 5.64451441e-03, program will also separate the output
polynomial is myPoly. The range of 4.61744055e-09, into four parts and displays a different
values that will be plotted for x is 4.98471222e- image for each of these four parts.
defined using “x = np.linspace(-5, 5, 06, 1.45947948e+02,
100)”. The other important variable 9.25502852e-06, Other useful functions
is y, which calculates and holds the 5.87353720e-02])
values of f(x) for each x value.
It is important that you start
ipython using the “ipython
In [42]: p.rvs((10,))
Out[42]: array([12, 11, 9,
9, 9, 10, 9, 4, 13, 8])
12 It is very useful to be able to
find out the data type of the
elements in an array; it can be done
--pylab=qt” parameters in order In [43]: ln.pdf(3) using the dtype() function. Similarly,
to see the output on your screen. Out[43]: the ndim() function returns the
If you are interested in plotting 0.013218067177522842 number of dimensions of an array.
polynomial functions, you should When reading data from external
experiment more, as NumPy can The example uses two statistics files, you can save their data columns
also calculate the derivatives of a distributions and may be difficult into separate variables using the
function and plot multiple functions to understand, but it is presented following method:
in the same output. in order to give you a better taste
of SciPy commands. In [10]: aa1,aa2 =
About SciPy

10 SciPy is built on top of NumPy

and is significantly more
advanced than NumPy. It supports
numerical integration, optimisations,
signal processing, image and
audio processing, and statistics. For
reference, the example below uses just

“For plotting
polynomial
functions,
experiment more”
62
 Scientific computing with NumPy Work with Python

Above Fitting to Polynomials

np.loadtxt(“timeN.txt”,
usecols=(0,1), unpack=True) The Python script uses a fifth degree should know that array broadcasting
polynomial, but if you want to use a has a rule: in order for two arrays to
The aforementioned command saves different degree instead then you only be considered for array broadcasting,
column 1 into variable aa1 and column have to change the following line: “the size of the trailing axes for both
2 into variable aa2. The “unpack=True” arrays in an operation must either be
allows the data to be assigned to two coefficients = np.polyfit(aa1, the same size or one of them must
different variables. Please note that the aa2, 5) be one.”
numbering of columns starts with 0. Put simply, array broadcasting
allows NumPy to “change” the
Array broadcasting
Fitting to polynomials dimensions of an array by filling
in NumPy it with data in order to be able to
do calculations with another array.
13 The NumPy polyfit() function
tries to fit a set of data points
to a polynomial. The data was found 14 To close, we will talk more about
array broadcasting because it
Nevertheless, you cannot stretch
both dimensions of an array to do
from the timeN.txt file, created earlier. is a very useful characteristic. First, you your job.

63
 Work with Python Python for system administrators

What you’ll need…

Python-devel
Python development libraries, required
for compiling third-party Python
Python for system
module

setuptools
setuptools allows you to download,
build, install, upgrade, and uninstall
Python packages with ease
administrators
Learn how Python can help by daring to replace the
usual shell scripting…
System administration is an important part of our computing
Note environment. It does not matter whether you are managing systems
This is written for the Python at your work our home. Linux, being a UNIX-based operating system,
2.X series, as it is still the most already has everything a system administrator needs, such as the
popular and default Python
distribution across all the world-class shells (not just one but many, including Bash, csh, zsh etc),
platforms (including all Linux handy tools, and many other features which make the Linux system an
distros, BSDs and Mac OS X).
administrator’s dream. So why do we need Python when Linux already
has everything built-in? Being a dynamic scripting language, Python
is very easy to read and learn. That’s just not us saying that, but many
Linux distributions actually use Python in core administrative parts. For
example, Red Hat (and Fedora) system setup tool Anaconda is written
in Python (read this line again, got the snake connection?). Also, tools like
GNU Mailman, CompizConfig Settings Manager (CCSM) and hundreds
of tiny GUI and non-GUI configuration tools are written using Python.
Python does not limit you on the choice of user interface to follow – you
can build command-line, GUI and web apps using Python. This way, it
has got covered almost all the possible interfaces. Here we will look into
executing sysadmin-related tasks using Python.

Parsing configuration files

Configuration files provide a way for applications to store various
settings. In order to write a script that allows you to modify settings of
a particular application, you should be able to parse the configuration
file of the application. In this section we learn how to parse INI-style
configuration files. Although old, the INI file format is very popular with
much modern open source software, such as PHP and MySQL.

Excerpt for php.ini configuration file:

[PHP]
engine = On

64
 Python for system administrators Work with Python

zend.ze1_compatibility_mode = Off host’,’localhost’)

short_open_tag = On config.set(‘MySQL’,’mysql.default_
asp_tags = Off port’,’3306’)
precision = 14 config.set(‘MySQL’,’mysql.allow_persistent’,
y2k_compliance = On ‘On’ )
output_buffering = 4096 config.set(‘MySQL’,’mysql.max_
;output_handler = persistent’,’20’)
zlib.output_compression = Off
with open(‘php.ini’, ‘ap’) as configfile:
[MySQL] config.write(configfile)
; Allow or prevent persistent links.
mysql.allow_persistent = On Output:php.ini
mysql.max_persistent = 20 [MySQL]
mysql.max_links = -1 mysql.max_persistent = 20
mysql.default_port = 3306 mysql.allow_persistent = On
mysql.default_socket = mysql.default_port = 3306
mysql.default_host = localhost mysql.default_host = localhost
mysql.connect_timeout = 60 mysql.trace_mode = Off
mysql.trace_mode = Off mysql.connect_timeout = 60

Python provides a built-in module called @code: parseconfig.py

ConfigParser (known as configparser in Python @description: Parsing and updating the
3.0). You can use this module to parse and create config file
configuration files. import ConfigParser
config = ConfigParser.ConfigParser()
@code: writeconfig.py config.read(‘php.ini’)
@description: The following demonstrates adding # Print config values
MySQL section to the php.ini file. print config.get(‘MySQL’,’mysql.default_
@warning: Do not use this script with the actual php. host’)
ini file, as it’s not designed to handle all aspects of a print config.get(‘MySQL’,’mysql.default_
complete php.ini file. port’)
config.remove_option(‘MySQL’,’mysql.trace_
import ConfigParser mode’)
config = ConfigParser.RawConfigParser() with open(‘php.ini’, ‘wb’) as configfile:
config.write(configfile)
config.add_section(‘MySQL’)
config.set(‘MySQL’,’mysql.trace_mode’,’Off’) Parsing JSON data
config.set(‘MySQL’,’mysql.connect_ JSON (also known as JavaScript Object Notation) is a
timeout’,’60’) lightweight modern data-interchange format. JSON is
config.set(‘MySQL’,’mysql.default_ an open standard under ECMA-262. It is a text format
65
 Work with Python Python for system administrators

and is completely language-independent. JSON is For this section we will use the simplejson.load
also used as the configuration file format for modern function, which allows us to deserialise a JSON object
applications such as Mozilla Firefox and Google into a Python object.
Chrome. JSON is also very popular with modern
web services such as Facebook, Twitter, Amazon EC2 @code: LUDSearch.py
etc. In this section we will use the Python module import simplejson, urllib
‘simplejson’ to access Yahoo Search (using the Yahoo APP_ID = ‘xxxxxxxx’ # Change this to
Web Services API), which outputs JSON data. your APP ID
To use this section, you should have the following: SEARCH_BASE = ‘http://search.yahooapis.
com/WebSearchService/V1/webSearch’
1. Python module: simplejson.
Note: You can install Python modules using the class YahooSearchError(Exception):
command ‘easy_install <module name>’. This pass
command assumes that you have a working internet
connection. def search(query, results=20, start=1,
2. Yahoo App ID: **kwargs):
The Yahoo App ID can be created from https:// kwargs.update({
developer.apps.yahoo.com/dashboard/createKey. ‘appid’: APP_ID,
html. The Yahoo App ID will be generated on the ‘query’: query,
next page. See the screenshot below for details. ‘results’: results,
simplejson is very easy to use. In the following ‘start’: start,
example we will use the capability of mapping ‘output’: ‘json’
JSON data structures directly to Python data types. })
This gives us direct access to the JSON data without url = SEARCH_BASE + ‘?’ + urllib.
developing any XML parsing code. urlencode(kwargs)
result = simplejson.load(urllib.
urlopen(url))
JSON PYTHON DATA MAPPING
if ‘Error’ in result:
JSON Python
# An error occurred; raise an
object dict exception
array list raise YahooSearchError,
string unicode result[‘Error’]
number (int) int, long
return result[‘ResultSet’]

number (real) float

Let’s use the code listed above from the Python shell
TRUE TRUE to see how it works. Change to the directory where
FALSE FALSE you have saved the LUDYSearch.py and open a
null None Python shell.

@code: Python Shell Output. Lines

66
 Python for system administrators Work with Python

Above Generating the Yahoo App ID

starting with ‘>>>’ indicate input encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_

>>> execfile(“LUDYSearch.py”) User_and_Developer
>>> results = search(‘Linux User and Linux User &amp;amp; Developer | Linux User http://
Developer’) www.linuxuser.co.uk/tag/linux-user-developer/
>>> results[‘totalResultsAvailable’]
123000000 Gathering system information
>>> results[‘totalResultsReturned’] An important job for a system administrator is
20 gathering system information. Here we will use the
>>> items = results[‘Result’] SIGAR (System Information Gatherer And Reporter)
>>> for Result in items: API to demonstrate how we can gather system
... print Result[‘Title’],Result[‘Url’] information using Python. SIGAR is a very complete
... API and can provide lots of information, including:

Linux User http://www.linuxuser.co.uk/ 1. System memory, swap, CPU, load average,

Linux User and Developer - Wikipedia, the free uptime, logins.
67
 Work with Python Python for system administrators

2. Per-process memory, CPU, credential info, state, (mem.total() / 1024), \

arguments, environment, open files. (mem.used() / 1024), \
3. File system detection and metrics. (mem.free() / 1024)
4. Network interface detection, configuration info print “Swap:\t”, \
and metrics. (swap.total() / 1024), \
5. TCP and UDP connection tables. (swap.used() / 1024), \
6. Network route table. (swap.free() / 1024)
print “RAM:\t”, mem.ram(), “MB”
Installing SIGAR print “==========File System
The first step is to build and install SIGAR. SIGAR is Information=============”
hosted at GitHub, so make sure that you have Git def format_size(size):
installed in your system. Then perform the following return sigar.format_size(size * 1024)
steps to install SIGAR and its Python bindings: print ‘Filesystem\tSize\tUsed\tAvail\
tUse%\tMounted on\tType\n’
$ git clone git://github.com/hyperic/ for fs in fslist:
sigar.git sigar.git dir_name = fs.dir_name()
$ cd sigar.git/bindings/python usage = sg.file_system_usage(dir_
$ sudo python setup.py install name)
total = usage.total()
At the end you should see a output similar to the used = total - usage.free()
following : avail = usage.avail()
Writing /usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/ pct = usage.use_percent() * 100
pysigar-0.1.egg-info if pct == 0.0:
SIGAR is a very easy-to-use library and can be used to pct = ‘-’
get information on almost every aspect of a system. print fs.dev_name(), format_
The next example shows you how to do this. The size(total), format_size(used), format_
following code shows the memory and the file size(avail),\
system information. pct, dir_name, fs.sys_type_
name(), ‘/’, fs.type_name()
@code: PySysInfo.py @Output
import os ==========Memory
import sigar Information==============
sg = sigar.open() Total Used Free
mem = sg.mem() Mem: 8388608 6061884 2326724
swap = sg.swap() Swap: 131072 16048 115024
fslist = sg.file_system_list() RAM: 8192 MB
print “==========Memory ==========File System
Information==============” Information============
print “\tTotal\tUsed\tFree” Filesystem Size Used Avail
print “Mem:\t”,\ Use% Mounted on Type
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 Python for system administrators Work with Python

/dev/disk0s2 300G 175G 124G 59.0 / hfs / import base64, getpass, os, socket, sys,
local socket, traceback
devfs 191K 191K 0 - /dev devfs / import paramiko
none import interactive
# setup logging
Accessing Secure Shell (SSH) services paramiko.util.log_to_file(‘demo_simple.
SSH (Secure Shell) is a modern replacement for an log’)
old remote shell system called Telnet. It allows data to # get hostname
be exchanged using a secure channel between two username = ‘’
networked devices. System administrators frequently if len(sys.argv) > 1:
use SSH to administrate networked systems. In hostname = sys.argv[1]
addition to providing remote shell, SSH is also used if hostname.find(‘@’) >= 0:
for secure file transfer (using SSH File Transfer Protocol, username, hostname = hostname.
or SFTP) and remote X server forwarding (allows split(‘@’)
you to use SSH clients as X server). In this section we else:
will learn how to use the SSH protocol from Python hostname = raw_input(‘Hostname: ‘)
using a Python module called paramiko, which if len(hostname) == 0:
implements the SSH2 protocol for Python. print ‘*** Hostname required.’
paramiko can be installed using the following steps: sys.exit(1)
port = 22
$ git clone https://github.com/robey/ if hostname.find(‘:’) >= 0:
paramiko.git hostname, portstr = hostname.
$ cd paramiko split(‘:’)
$ sudo python setup.py install port = int(portstr)
# get username
To the core of paramiko is the SSHClient class. This if username == ‘’:
class wraps L{Transport}, L{Channel}, and L{SFTPClient} default_username = getpass.getuser()
to handle most of the aspects of SSH. You can use username = raw_input(‘Username [%s]:
SSHClient as: ‘ % default_username)
if len(username) == 0:
client = SSHClient() username = default_username
client.load_system_host_keys() password = getpass.getpass(‘Password for
client.connect(‘some.host.com’) %s@%s: ‘ % (username, hostname))
stdin, stdout, stderr = client.exec_ # now, connect and use paramiko Client
command(‘dir’) to negotiate SSH2 across the connection
try:
The following example demonstrates a full SSH client client = paramiko.SSHClient()
written using the paramiko module. client.load_system_host_keys()
client.set_missing_host_key_
@code: PySSHClient.py policy(paramiko.WarningPolicy)
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 Work with Python Python for system administrators

print ‘*** Connecting...’ [~ $:]

client.connect(hostname, port,
username, password) If the host key for the SSH server is not added to your
chan = client.invoke_shell() $HOME/.ssh/known_hosts file, the client will throw
print repr(client.get_transport()) the following error:
print ‘*** SSH Server Connected!
***’ *** Caught exception: <type ‘exceptions.
print TypeError’>: unbound method missing_
interactive.interactive_shell(chan) host_key() must be called with
chan.close() WarningPolicy instance as first
client.close() argument (got SSHClient instance
except Exception, e: instead)
print ‘*** Caught exception: %s:
%s’ % (e.__class__, e) This means that the client cannot verify the
traceback.print_exc() authenticity of the server you are connected to. To
try: add the host key to known_hosts, you can use the
client.close() ssh command. It is important to remember that this
except: is not the ideal way to add the host key; instead you
pass should use ssh-keygen. But for simplicity’s sake we
sys.exit(1) are using the ssh client.

To run this code you will also need a custom Python kunal@ubuntu-vm-kdeo:~/.ssh$ ssh
class interactive.py which implements the interactive luduser@192.168.1.2
shell for the SSH session. Look for this file on FileSilo The authenticity of host ‘192.168.1.2
and copy it into the same folder where you have (192.168.1.2)’ can’t be established.
created PySSHClient.py . RSA key fingerprint is be:01:76:6a:b9:bb:6
9:64:e3:dc:37:00:a4:36:33:d1.
@code_Output Are you sure you want to continue
kunal@ubuntu-vm-kdeo:~/src/paramiko/ connecting (yes/no)? yes
demos$ python demo_simple.py Warning: Permanently added ‘192.168.1.2’
Hostname: 192.168.1.2 (RSA) to the list of known hosts.
Username [kunal]: luduser
Password for luduser@192.168.1.2: So now you’ve seen just how easy it can be to carry
*** Connecting... out the complex sysadmin tasks using Python’s
<paramiko.Transport at 0xb76201acL versatile language.
(cipher aes128-ctr, 128 bits) (active; 1 As is the case with all Python coding, the code that
open channel(s))> is presented here can fairly easily be adopted into
*** SSH Server Connected! *** your GUI application (using software such as PyGTK
Last login: Thu Jan 13 02:01:06 2011 or PyQt) or a web application (using a framework
from 192.168.1.9 such as Django or Grok).
70
 Python for system administrators Work with Python

Writing a user interface using Python

Administrators are comfortable with running raw scripts by gg=Grid(2,1)

hand, but end-users are not. So if you are writing a script that gg.setField(l,0,0)
is supposed to be used by common users, it is a good idea to gg.setField(e,1,0)
create a user-friendly interface on top of the script. This way
end-users can run the scripts just like any other application. To g.add(Label(‘’),0,1)
demonstrate this, we will create a simple GRUB configuration g.add(gg,0,2)
tool which allows users to select default boot entry and g.add(Label(‘’),0,3)
the timeout. We will be creating a TUI (text user interface) g.add(bb,0,4,growx=1)
application and will use the Python module ‘snack’ to facilitate result = g.runOnce()
this (not to be confused with the Python audio library, tksnack). if bb.buttonPressed(result) == ‘cancel’:
screen.finish()
This app consists of two files… sys.exit(0)
else:
grub.py: GRUB Config File (grub.conf) Parser (available on entry_value = e.value()
FileSilo). It implements two main functions, readBootDB() and try :
writeBootFile(), which are responsible for reading and writing c = int(entry_value)
the GRUB configuration file. break
grub_tui.py: Text user interface file for manipulating the GRUB except ValueError:
configuration file using the functions available in grub.py. continue

@code:grub_tui.py writeBootFile(c, li.current())

import sys screen.finish()
from snack import *
if __name__== ‘__main__’:
from grub import (readBootDB, writeBootFile) main()

def main(entry_value=’1’,kernels=[]): Start the tool using the sudo command (as it reads the grub.
try: conf file)
(default_value, entry_value,
kernels)=readBootDB() $ sudo grub_tui.py
except:
print >> sys.stderr, (“Error reading /boot/
grub/grub.conf.”)
sys.exit(10)

screen=SnackScreen()

while True:
g=GridForm(screen, (“Boot configuration”),1,5)
if len(kernels)>0 :
li=Listbox(height=len(kernels), width=20,
returnExit=1)
for i, x in enumerate(kernels):
li.append(x,i)
g.add(li, 0, 0)
li.setCurrent(default_value)

bb = ButtonBar(screen, (((“Ok”), “ok”),

((“Cancel”), “cancel”)))

e=Entry(3, str(entry_value))
l=Label((“Timeout (in seconds):”))

71
 Work with Python Scrape Wikipedia with Beautiful Soup

What you’ll need…

Beautiful Soup
www.crummy.com/software/
BeautifulSoup/
Scrape
HTML5Lib
https://github.com/html5lib/
html5lib-python

Python 2.6+ & WikiParser.

Wikipedia with
zip Six
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/six/

Beautiful Soup
Use the Beautiful Soup Python library to parse
Wikipedia’s HTML and store it for offline reading
In this tutorial we’ll use the popular Python library Beautiful Soup to
scrape Wikipedia for links to articles and then save those pages for offline
reading. This is ideal for when travelling or in a location with a poor
internet connection.
The plan is simple: using Beautiful Soup with the HTML5Lib Parser,
we’re going to load a Wikipedia page, remove all of the GUI and
unrelated content, search the content for links to other Wikipedia articles
and then, after a tiny bit of modification, write them to a file.
Even though it’s now the de facto knowledge base of the world,
Wikipedia isn’t great when it comes to DOM consistency – that is, IDs and
classes are sometimes quite loose in their usage. Because of this, we will
also cover how to handle all of the excess bits and bobs of the Wikipedia
GUI that we don’t need, as well as the various erroneous links that won’t
be of much use to us. You can find the CSS stylings sheet and a Python
script pertaining to this tutorial at http://bit.ly/19MibBv.

Install Beautiful Soup & HTML5Lib

Infinite Links
Wikipedia has a lot of links and
when you start following links
01 Before we can start writing code, we need to install the libraries we’ll be using
for the program (Beautiful Soup, HTML5Lib, Six). The installation process is
fairly standard: grab the libraries from their respective links, then unzip them. In
to links to links, the number of the terminal, enter the unzipped directory and run python setup.py install for each
pages you have to parse can library. They will now be ready for use.
grow exponentially, depending
on the subject matter. By passing
through the levels value, we put a
cap on the amount of pages we
can grab–- although the number “Wikipedia isn’t great when it comes
of files stored can still vary greatly.
Use it wisely. to DOM consistency”
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 Scrape Wikipedia with Beautiful Soup Work with Python

Full code listing

1 Import libraries import os, sys, urllib2, argparse, datetime, atexit
These are the 01 from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
libraries we are
addresses = []
going to be using deepestAddresses = []
for this program
maxLevel = 1
storeFolder = “Wikistore “ + str(datetime.datetime.now().strftime(“%Y-%m-%d %H:%M”))

undesirables = [ {“element” : “table”, “attr” : {‘class’ : ‘infobox’} }, {“element” :

02 “table”, “attr” : {‘class’ : ‘vertical-navbox’}}, {“element” : “span”, “attr” : {‘class’
: ‘mw-editsection’}}, {“element” : “div”, “attr” : {‘class’ : ‘thumb’}}, {“element”
: “sup”, “attr” : {‘class’ : ‘reference’}}, {“element” : “div”, “attr” : {‘class’ :
‘reflist’}}, {“element” : “table”, “attr” : {‘class’ : ‘nowraplinks’}}, {“element” :
2 Set up variables “table”, “attr” : {‘class’ : ‘ambox-Refimprove’}}, {“element” : “img”, “attr” : None},
These are some {“element” : “script”, “attr” : None}, {“element” : “table”, “attr” : {‘class’ :
variables we’ll use ‘mbox-small’}} , {“element” : “span”, “attr” : {“id” : “coordinates”}}, {“element” :
“table”, “attr” : {“class” : “ambox-Orphan”}}, {“element” : “div”, “attr” : {“class” :
to keep track of the “mainarticle”}}, {“element” : None, “attr” : {“id” : “References”}} ]
script’s progress
def init():
parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description=’Handle the starting page and number
of levels we\’re going to scrape’)
parser.add_argument(‘-URL’, dest=’link’, action=’store’, help=’The Wikipedia page
from which we will start scraping’)
parser.add_argument(‘-levels’, dest=”levels”, action=’store’, help=’How many levels
deep should the scraping go’)
args = parser.parse_args()
3 Initialisation
This is the initialising if(args.levels != None):
global maxLevel8
function that we
will use to handle
03 maxLevel = int(args.levels)

the input coming if(args.link == None):

from the user print(“You need to pass a link with the -URL flag”)
sys.exit(0)
else:
if not os.path.exists(storeFolder):
os.makedirs(storeFolder)

grabPage(args.link, 0, args.link.split(“/wiki/”)[1].strip().replace(“_”, “ “))

atexit.register(cleanUp)

def isValidLink(link):

if “/wiki/” in link and “:” not in link and “http://” not in link and “wikibooks”
not in link and “#” not in link and “wikiquote” not in link and “wiktionary” not in
link and “wikiversity” not in link and “wikivoyage” not in link and “wikisource” not
in link and “wikinews” not in link and “wikiversity” not in link and “wikidata” not
in link:
return True
else:
return False

def grabPage(URL, level, name):

04
opener = urllib2.build_opener()
opener.addheaders = [(‘User-agent’, ‘Mozilla/5.0’)]
req = opener.open(URL)

73
 Work with Python Scrape Wikipedia with Beautiful Soup

Creating some useful variables

Wiki-Everything
Wikipedia has so many different
services that interlink with each
02 These variables will keep track of the links we’ve accessed while the script
has been running: addresses is a list containing every link we’ve accessed;
deepestAddresses are the links of the pages that were the furthest down the link
other; however, we don’t want
to grab those pages, so we’ve tree from our starting point; storeFolder is where we will save the HTML files we
got quite a lengthy conditional create and maxLevel is the maximum depth that we can follow the links to from
statement to stop that. It’s pretty our starting page.
good at making sure we only get
links from Wikipedia.
Handling the user’s input

03 In the first few lines of this function, we’re just creating a helper statement.
Afterwards, we’re parsing any arguments passed into the program on its
execution and looking for a -URL flag and a -levels flag. The -levels flag is optional as
we already have a preset depth that we’ll follow the links to, but we need a link to
start from so if the -URL flag is missing, we’ll prompt the user and exit. If we have a link,
then we quickly check whether or not we have a directory to store files in – which
we’ll create if we don’t – and then we’ll fire off the function to get that page. Finally, we
register a handler for when the script tries to exit. We’ll get to that bit later.

Retrieving the page from the URL

04 Here we’re using URLLib2 to request the page the the user has asked for
and then, once we’ve received that page, we’re going to pass the content
through to Beautiful Soup with the soup variable. This gives us access to the
methods we’re going to call as we parse the document.

Trimming the fat

05 Wikipedia has a lot of nodes that we don’t want to parse. The content
variable allows us to straight away ignore most of Wikipedia’s GUI, but
there are still lots of elements that we don’t want to parse. We remedy this by
iterating through the list ‘undesirables’ that we created earlier on in the document.
For each different div/section/node that we don’t want, we call Beautiful Soup’s
find_all() method and use the extract() method to remove that node from the
document. At the end of the undesirables loop, most of the content we don’t
want any more will be gone. We also look for the ‘also’ element in the Wiki page.
Generally, everything after this div is of no use to us. By calling the find_all_next()
method on the also node, we can get a list of every other element we can
remove from that point on.

“The HTML page uses built-in browser

styles when rendering the page”
74
 Scrape Wikipedia with Beautiful Soup Work with Python

“Wikipedia has so many different services that interlink with

each other; we don’t want to grab those pages”

page = req.read()

req.close()

soup = BeautifulSoup(page, “html5lib”, from_encoding=”UTF-8”)

content = soup.find(id=”mw-content-text”)

if hasattr(content, ‘find_all’):
4 Get the page
global undesirables
Here we grab the
page we want to for notWanted in undesirables:
store and remove 04
the bits of the removal = content.find_all(notWanted[‘element’], notWanted[‘attr’])
if len(removal) > 0:
document we
for el in removal:
don’t need el.extract()
Styling
also = content.find(id=”See_also”)
Currently, the HTML page will use the
if(also != None): built-in browser styles when rendering the
also.extract() page. If you like, you can include the style
tail = also.find_all_next() sheet included in the tutorial resources
if(len(tail) > 0): to make it look a little nicer. To use it, you
for element in tail:
can minify the script and include it inside
element.extract()
a <style> tag in the head string on line
for link in content.find_all(‘a’): 102, or you can rewrite the head string to
something like:
href = link[“href”]
head = “<head><meta
5 Check links if isValidLink(href): charset=\”UTF-8\” /><title>” +
Then we iterate fileName + “</title><style>” +
through all of the if level < maxLevel: str(open(“/PATH/TO/STYLES”, ‘r’).
<a> tags and check read()) + “</style></head>”
stored = False;
if there’s a valid link
05 for addr in addresses:
to another page if addr == link.get(“href”):
we can grab, and stored = True
tweak them for our
own use if(stored == False):
title = link.get(‘href’).replace(“/wiki/”, “”)
addresses.append(str(title + “.html”))
grabPage(“http://en.wikipedia.org” + link.get(‘href’), level +
1, title)
print title

link[“href”] = link[“href”].replace(“/wiki/”, “”) + “.html”

fileName = str(name)
06 if level == maxLevel:
deepestAddresses.append(fileName.replace(‘/’, ‘_’) + “.html”)

75
 Work with Python Scrape Wikipedia with Beautiful Soup

Above Find the documentation for

Beautiful Soup at http://bit.ly/O2H8iD Grabbing the links

06 By calling content.find_all(‘a’) we get a list of every <a> in the

document. We can iterate through this and check whether or not
there is a valid Wikipedia link in the <a>’s href. If the link is a valid link, we
quickly check how far down the link tree we are from the original page. If
we’ve reached the maximum depth we can go, we’ll store this page and call
it quits, otherwise we’ll start looking for links that we can grab within it. For
every page we request, we append its URL to the addresses list; to make sure
we don’t call the same page twice for each link we find, we check if we’ve
already stored it. If we have, then we’ll skip over the rest of the loop, but if
we’ve not then we’ll add it to the list of URLs that we’ve requested and fire off
a request. Once that check is done, We then do a quick string replace on that
link so that it points to the local directory, not to the subfolder /wiki/ that it’s
looking for.

Writing to file

07 Now we create a file to store the newly parsed document in for later
reading. We change any ‘/’ in the filename to ‘_’ so the script doesn’t
try and write to a random folder. We also do a quick check to see how many
links we’ve followed since the first page. If it’s the max level, we’ll add it to the
deepestAddresses list. We’ll use this a little bit later.

76
 Scrape Wikipedia with Beautiful Soup Work with Python

Tying up loose ends

08 After our script has iterated through every link on every page to the
maximum level of depth that it can, it will try to exit. On line 34 of the
code (on the disc and online) in the init function, we registered the function
cleanUp to execute on the program trying to exit; cleanUp’s job is to go through
the documents that we’ve downloaded and check that every link we’ve left in
the pages does in fact link to a file that we have available. If it can’t match the link
in the href to a file in the addresses list, it will remove it. Once we’re done, we will
have a fully portable chunk of Wikipedia we can take with us.

doctype = “<!DOCTYPE html>”

6 Copy to file
After that, We take head = “<head><meta charset=\”UTF-8\” /><title>” + fileName + “</title></
the content we’ve head>”
parsed and put it
06
f = open(storeFolder + “/” + fileName.replace(‘/’, ‘_’) + “.html”, ‘w’)
into a brand new f.write(doctype + “<html lang=\”en\”>” + head + “<body><h1>” + fileName + “</
HTML file h1>” + str(content) + “</body></html>”)
f.close()

def cleanUp():

print(“\nRemoving links to pages that have not been saved\n”)

for deepPage in deepestAddresses:

rF = open(storeFolder + “/” + deepPage, ‘r’)

deepSoup = BeautifulSoup(rF.read(), “html5lib”, from_encoding=”UTF-8”)

for deepLinks in deepSoup.find_all(‘a’):

link = deepLinks.get(“href”)
7 Clean up
pageStored = False
Once every page
has been parsed for addr in addresses:
and stored, we’ll 07 if addr == link:
go on through and pageStored = True
try to remove any
if pageStored == False:
dead links
if link is not None:

if ‘#’ not in link:

del deepLinks[‘href’]
elif ‘#’ in link and len(link.split(‘#’)) > 1 or ‘:’ in link:
del deepLinks[‘href’]

wF = open(storeFolder + “/” + deepPage, ‘w’)

wF.write(str(deepSoup))
wF.close()

print(“Complete”)
8 Initialise
This is how we will
initialise our script 08 if __name__ == “__main__”:
init()

77
Create with Python Have fun with programming

Create with Python

What could be more satisfying than playing a game that you have
programmed yourself? In this section we’re going to show you how to
do just that. We’ll get started with a simple game of tic-tac-toe, made
with the help of Kivy (p.80), before stepping things up a notch and
cloning the classic favourite, Pong (p.86). Then, it’s time to have a go at
making a Space Invaders-inspired game complete with retro graphics
(p.88). Finally, you’ll learn how to make a stripped-back ‘choose-your-
own-adventure’ game (p.98).

78
Have fun with programming Create with Python

“Making a playable game is not

as difficult as you may think”
79
 Create with Python Build tic-tac-toe with Kivy

What you’ll need…

Python
www.python.org/doc
Build tic-tac-toe
with Kivy
Ease into the workings of Kivy by creating the pen-
and-paper classic in just over 100 lines of Python...
Kivy is a highly cross-platform graphical framework for Python, designed
for the creation of innovative user interfaces like multitouch apps. Its
applications can run not only on the traditional desktop platforms of
Linux, OS X and Windows, but also Android and iOS, plus devices like the
Raspberry Pi.
That means you can develop cross-platform apps using Python
libraries such as Requests, SQLAlchemy or even NumPy. You can even
access native mobile APIs straight from Python using some of Kivy’s
sister projects. Another great feature is the Cython-optimised OpenGL
graphics pipeline, allowing advanced GPU effects even though the basic
Python API is very simple.
Kivy is a set of Python/Cython modules that can easily be installed via
pip, but you’ll need a few dependencies. It uses Pygame as a rendering
backend (though its API is not exposed), Cython for compilation of the
speedy graphics compiler internals, and GStreamer for multimedia.
These should all be available through your distro’s repositories, or via pip
where applicable.
With these dependencies satisfied, you should be able install Kivy with
the normal pip incantation. The current version is 1.8.0, and the same
codebase supports both python2 and python3. The code in this tutorial
is also version-agnostic, running in python2.7 and python3.3.

pip install kivy

If you have any problems with pip, you can use easy_install via easy_
install kivy.
There are also packages or repositories available for several popular
distros. You can find more information on Kivy’s website. A kivy
application is started by instantiating and running an ‘App’ class. This is
what initialises our pp’s window, interfaces with the OS, and provides an

80
 Build tic-tac-toe with Kivy Create with Python

entry point for the creation of our GUI. We can start

by making the simplest Kivy app possible:

from kivy.app import App

class TicTacToeApp(App):
pass

if __name__ == “__main__”:
TicTacToeApp().run()

You can already run this, your app will start up and
you’ll get a plain black window. Exciting! Above The game with final additions, making the grid square and
extending the interface
We can build our own GUI out of Kivy widgets.
Each is a simple graphics element with some
specific behaviour of its own ranging from def build(self):
standard GUI functionality (eg the Button, Label return Label(text=’Hello World!’,
or TextInput), to those that impose positioning on font_size=100,
their child widgets (eg the BoxLayout, FloatLayout color=0, 1, 0, 1)) # (r, g, b, a)
or GridLayout), to those abstracting a more
involved task like interacting with hardware (eg The ‘build’ method is called when the ‘App’ is run,
the FileChooser, Camera or VideoPlayer). Most and whatever widget is returned automatically
importantly, Kivy’s widgets are designed to be easily becomes the root widget of that App’. In our case
combined - rather than including a widget for every that’s a Label, and we’ve set several properties - the
need imaginable, widgets are kept simple but are ‘text’, ‘font_size’ and ‘color’. All widgets have different
easy to join to invent new interfaces. We’ll see some properties controlling aspects of their behaviour,
of that in this tutorial. which can be dynamically updated to alter their
Since ‘Hello World!’ is basically compulsory in any appearance later, though here we set them just once
programming tutorial, let’s get it over with by using a upon instantiation.
simple ‘Label’ widget to display the text: Note that these properties are not just Python
attributes but instead Kivy properties. These are
from kivy.uix.label import Label accessed like normal attributes but provide extra
functionality by hooking into Kivy’s event system.
We’ll display the ‘Label’ by returning it as our app’s We’ll see examples of creating properties shortly,
root widget. Every app has a single root widget, the and you should do the same if you want to use your
top level of its widget tree, and it will automatically variables with Kivy’s event or binding functionality.
be sized to fill the window. We’ll see later how to That’s all you need to show some simple text, so
construct a full GUI by adding more widgets for this run the program again to check that this does work.
one, but for now it’s enough to set the root widget You can experiment with the parameters if it’s unclear
by adding a new method to the ‘App’: what any of them are doing.
81
 Create with Python Build tic-tac-toe with Kivy

Our own widget: tic-tac-toe child widgets. This example demonstrates the
Since Kivy doesn’t have a tic-tac-toe widget, we’ll have former, creating a rule for the ‘TicTacToeGrid’ widget
to make our own! It’s natural to create a new widget by declaring that every ‘TicTacToeGrid’ instantiated
class to contain this behaviour: should have its ‘cols’ property set to 3.
We’ll use some more kv language features later, but
from kivy.uix.gridlayout import GridLayout for now let’s go back to Python to create the buttons
class TicTacToeGrid(GridLayout): that will be the entries in our tic-tac-toe grid.
pass
from kivy.uix.button import Button
Now this obviously doesn’t do anything yet, from kivy.properties import ListProperty
except that it inherits all the behaviour of the Kivy
GridLayout widget - that is, we’ll need to tell it how class GridEntry(Button):
many columns to have, but then it will automatically coords = ListProperty([0, 0])
arrange any child widgets to fit nicely with as many
rows as necessary. Tic-tac-toe requires three columns This inherits from Kivy’s ‘Button’ widget, which
and nine children. interacts with mouse or touch input, dispatching
Here we introduce the Kivy language (kv), a events when interactions toggle it. We can hook
special domain-specific language for making into these events to call our own functions when
rules describing Kivy widget trees. It’s very simple a user presses the button, and can set the button’s
but removes a lot of necessary boilerplate for ‘text’ property to display the ‘X’ or ‘O’. We also created
manipulating the GUI with Python code - as a loose a new Kivy property for our widget, ‘coords’ – we’ll
analogy you might think of it as the HTML/CSS to show how this is useful later on. It’s almost identical
Python’s JavaScript. Python gives us the dynamic to making a normal Python attribute by writing ‘self.
power to do anything, but all that power gets in the coords = [0, 0]’ in ‘GridEntry.__init__’.
way if we just want to declare the basic structure As with the ‘TicTacToeGrid’, we’ll style our new class
of our GUI. Note that you never need kv language, with kv language, but this time we get to see a more
you can always do the same thing in Python alone, interesting feature.
but the rest of the example may show why Kivy
programmers usually like to use kv. <GridEntry>:
Kivy comes with all the tools needed to use kv font_size: self.height
language; the simplest way is to write it in a file with
a name based on our App class. That is, we should As before, this syntax defines a rule for how a
place the following in a file named ‘tictactoe.kv’: ‘GridEntry’ widget should be constructed, this time
setting the ‘font_size’ property that controls the size
<TicTacToeGrid>: of the text in the button’s label. The extra magic is
cols: 3 that kv language automatically detects that we’ve
referenced the Button’s own height and will create
This is the basic syntax of kv language; for each a binding to update this relationship – when a
widget type we may write a rule defining its ‘GridEntry’ widget’s height changes, its ‘font_size’
behaviour, including setting its properties and adding will change so the text fits perfectly. We could have
82
 Build tic-tac-toe with Kivy Create with Python

made these bindings straight from Python (another display them and knows it should automatically
usage of the ‘bind’ method used later on), but that’s arrange them into a grid with the number of
rarely as convenient as referencing the property we columns we set earlier.
want to bind to. Now all we have to do is replace our root widget
Let’s now populate our ‘TicTacToeGrid’ with (returned from ‘App.build’) with a ‘TicTacToeGrid’ and
‘GridEntry’ widgets. we can see what our app looks like.

class TicTacToeGrid(GridLayout): def build(self):

def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs): return TicTacToeGrid()
super(TicTacToeGrid, self).__init__(*args,
**kwargs) With this complete you can run your main Python file
for row in range(3): again and enjoy your new program. All being well,
for column in range(3): the single Label is replaced by a grid of nine buttons,
grid_entry = GridEntry( each of which you can click (it will automatically
coords=(row, column)) change colour) and release (you’ll see the printed
grid_entry.bind(on_release=self.button_ output information from our binding).
pressed) We could customise the appearance by modifying
self.add_widget(grid_entry) other properties of the Button, but for now we’ll leave
them as they are.
def button_pressed(self, instance):
print(‘{} button clicked!’.format(instance. Has anyone won yet?
coords)) We’ll want to keep track of the state of the board to
check if anyone has won, which we can do with a
This introduces a few new concepts: When we couple more Kivy properties:
instantiated our ‘GridEntry’ widgets, we were able to
set their ‘coords’ property by simply passing it in as from kivy.properties import (ListProperty,
a kwarg. This is a minor feature that is automatically NumericProperty)
handled by Kivy properties.
We used the ‘bind’ method to call the grid’s class TicTacToeGrid(GridLayout):
‘button_pressed’ method whenever the `GridEntry` status = ListProperty([0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0,
widget dispatches an ‘on_release’ event. This is 0, 0, 0])
automatically handled by its ‘Button’ superclass, and current_player = NumericProperty(1)
will occur whenever a user presses, then releases a
‘GridEntry’ button. We could also bind to ‘on_press’, This adds an internal status list representing who has
which is dispatched when the button is first clicked, played where, and a number to represent the current
or to any Kivy property of the button, dispatched player (1 for ‘O’, -1 for ‘X’).
dynamically when the property is modified. By placing these numbers in our status list, we’ll know
We added each ‘GridEntry’ widget to our ‘Grid’ via if somebody wins because the sum of a row, column or
the ‘add_widget’ method. That means each one diagonal will be +-3. Now we can update our graphical
is a child widget of the ‘TicTacToeGrid’, and so it will grid when a move is played.
83
 Create with Python Build tic-tac-toe with Kivy

def button_pressed(self, button): def on_status(self, instance, new_value):

player = {1: ‘O’, -1: ‘X’} status = new_value
colours = {1: (1, 0, 0, 1), -1: (0, 1, 0,
1)} # (r, g, b, a) sums = [sum(status[0:3]), # rows
sum(status[3:6]),
row, column = button.coords sum(status[6:9]),
sum(status[0::3]), # columns
status_index = 3*row + column sum(status[1::3]),
already_played = self.status[status_index] sum(status[2::3]),
sum(status[::4]), # diagonals
if not already_played: sum(status[2:-2:2])]
self.status[status_index] = self.
current_player if 3 in sums:
button.text = {1: ‘O’, -1: ‘X’}[self. print(‘Os win!’)
current_player] elif -3 in sums:
button.background_color = colours[self. print(‘Xs win!’)
current_player] elif 0 not in self.status: # Grid full
self.current_player *= -1 print(‘Draw!’)

You can run your app again to see exactly what this This covers the basic detection of a won or drawn
did, and you’ll find that clicking each button now board, but it only prints the result to stdout. At this
places an ‘O’ or ‘X’ as well as a coloured background stage we probably want to reset the board so that
depending on whose turn it is to play. Not only that, the players can try again, along with displaying a
but you can only play one move in each button graphical indicator of the result.
thanks to our status array that keeps track of the
existing moves. def reset(self, *args):
This is enough to play the game but there’s one self.status = [0 for _ in range(9)]
vital element missing... a big pop-up telling you when
you’ve won! Before we can do that, we need to add for child in self.children:
some code to check if the game is over. child.text = ‘’
Kivy properties have another useful feature child.background_color = (1, 1, 1, 1)
here, whenever they change they automatically
call an ‘on_propertyname’ method if it exists and self.current_player = 1
dispatch a corresponding event in Kivy’s event
system. That makes it very easy to write code that Finally, we can modify the `on_status` method to
will run when a property changes, both in Python both reset the board and display the winner
and kv language. In our case we can use it to in a ‘ModalView’ widget.
check the status list every time it is updated, doing
something special if a player has filled a column, from kivy.uix.modalview import ModalView
row or diagonal.
84
 Build tic-tac-toe with Kivy Create with Python

This is a pop-up widget that draws itself on top of

everything else rather than as part of the normal
widget tree. It also automatically closes when the user
clicks or taps outside it.

winner = None
if -3 in sums:
winner = ‘Xs win!’
elif 3 in sums:
winner = ‘Os win!’
elif 0 not in self.status:
winner = ‘Draw...nobody wins!’
Above A tic-tac-toe grid now accepting input, adding in an O or X
alternately, each go
if winner:
popup = ModalView(size_hint=0.75, 0.5))
victory_label = Label(text=winner, Time to experiment
font_size=50) This has been a quick tour through some of Kivy’s
popup.add_widget(victory_label) features, but hopefully it demonstrates how to think
popup.bind(on_dismiss=self.reset) about building a Kivy application. Our programs
popup.open() are built from individual Kivy widgets, interacting
by having Python code run when their properties
This mostly uses the same ideas we already covered, change (eg our ‘on_status’ method) or when they
adding the ‘Label’ widget to the ‘ModalView’ then dispatch events (eg ‘Button’ ‘on_release’). We also
letting the ‘ModalView’ take care of drawing itself briefly saw kv language and experienced how it can
and its children on top of everything else. We also automatically create bindings between properties.
use another binding; this time to ‘on_dismiss’, which You can find a copy of the full program on FileSilo,
is an event dispatched by the ‘ModalView’ when reference this to check you’ve followed everything
it is closed. Finally, we made use of the ‘size_hint’ correctly. We’ve also added an extra widget, the
property common to all widgets, which in this case ‘Interface’, with a structure coded entirely in kv
is used to set the ‘ModalView’ size proportional to language that demonstrates how to add child
the window – while a ‘ModalView’ is open you can widgets. Test it by uncommenting the ‘return
resize the window to see it dynamically resize, always Interface()’ line in ‘TicTacToeGrid.build’. It doesn’t
maintaining these proportions. This is another trick do anything fundamentally different to what we
made possible by a binding with the ‘size_hint’ Kivy already covered, but it does make extensive use of
property, this time managed internally by Kivy. kv language’s binding ability to automatically update
That’s it, a finished program! We can now not only a label showing the current player, and to resize the
play tic-tac-toe, but our program automatically tells TicTacToeGrid so it is always square to fit within its
us when somebody has won, and resets the board parent. You can play with the settings to see how it
so we can play again. Simply run your program and fits together, or try swapping out the different widget
enjoy hours of fun! types to see how other widgets behave.

85
 Create with Python Make a Pong clone with Python

What you’ll need…

Latest Raspbian Image
www.raspberrypi.org/downloads
Make a Pong
Pillow
https://github.com/python-imaging/Pillow

SimpleGUITk
https://github.com/dholm/simpleguitk/
clone with
Python
We update the retro classic Pong for the Linux
generation with a new library called SimpleGUITk
Below ‘Tux for Two’ is a great little
Pong clone using the beloved Linux
mascot, Tux, in the centre of the action
The Raspberry Pi is a fantastic way to start learning how to code.
One area that can be very rewarding for amateur coders is game
programming, allowing for a more interactive result and a greater sense
of accomplishment. Game programming can also teach improvisation
and advanced mathematics skills for code. We’ll be using the fantastic
SimpleGUITk module in Python, a very straightforward way of creating
graphical interfaces based on Tkinter.

Python module preparation The SimpleGUI code

01 Head to the websites we’ve listed in ‘What you’ll need’ and download a zip of
the source files from the GitHub pages. Update your Raspbian packages and
then install the following:
05 The important parts in the
draw function are the draw_
line, draw_image and draw_text
$ sudo apt-get install python-dev python-setuptools tk8.5-dev functions. These are specifically from
tcl8.5-dev SimpleGUI, and allow you to easily put
these objects on the screen with a
Install the modules Write your code position, size and colour. You need to
tie them to an object, though – in this
case, canvas. This tells the software
02 Open the terminal and use cd
to move to the extracted Pillow
folder. Once there, type:
03 Launch IDLE 2, rather than IDLE 3,
and open a new window. Use the
code listing to create our game ‘Tux for
that we want to put these items on
the screen for people to see.
$ sudo python setup.py install Two’. Be careful to follow along with the
Once that’s complete, move to the code to make sure you know what you’re SimpleGUI setup code
simpleguitk folder and use the same doing. This way, you can make your own
command to install that as well. changes to the game rules if you wish.

Set up the game

06 The last parts are purely for
the interface. We tell the code
what to do when a key is depressed
and then released, and give it a frame

04 There’s nothing too groundbreaking to start the code: Tux’s and the paddles’
initial positions are set, along with the initial speed and direction of Tux. These
are also used when a point is won and the playing field is reset. The direction and
to work in. The frame is then told what
functions handle the graphics, key
functions etc. Finally, we give it frame.
speed is set to random for each spawn. start() so it starts.

86
 Make a Pong clone with Python Create with Python

Full code listing

import simpleguitk as simplegui if tux_pos[0] <= pad_w + tux_r:
import random if (paddle1_pos+(pad_h/2)) >=
tux_pos[1] >= (paddle1_pos-(pad_h/2)):
w, h = 600, 400 tux_vel[0] = -tux_vel[0]*1.1
tux_r = 20 tux_vel[1] *= 1.1
pad_w= 8 else:
pad_h = 80 score2 += 1
tux_spawn(True)
def tux_spawn(right): elif tux_pos[0] >= w - pad_w - tux_r:
global tux_pos, tux_vel if (paddle2_pos+(pad_h/2)) >=
tux_pos = [0,0] tux_pos[1] >= (paddle2_pos-(pad_h/2)):
tux_vel = [0,0] tux_vel[0] = -tux_vel[0]
tux_pos[0] = w/2 tux_vel[1] *= 1.1
tux_pos[1] = h/2 else:
if right: score1 += 1
tux_vel[0] = random.randrange(2, 4) tux_spawn(False)
else: canvas.draw_image(tux, (265 / 2, 314 / 2),
tux_vel[0] = -random.randrange(2, 4) (265, 314), tux_pos, (45, 45))
tux_vel[1] = -random.randrange(1, 3) canvas.draw_text(str(score1), [150, 100],
30, “Green”)
def start(): canvas.draw_text(str(score2), [450, 100],
global paddle1_pos, paddle2_pos, 30, “Green”)
paddle1_vel, paddle2_vel
global score1, score2 def keydown(key):
tux_spawn(random.choice([True, False])) global paddle1_vel, paddle2_vel
score1, score2 = 0,0 acc = 3
paddle1_vel, paddle2_vel = 0,0 if key == simplegui.KEY_MAP[“w”]:
paddle1_pos, paddle2_pos = h/2, h/2 paddle1_vel -= acc
elif key == simplegui.KEY_MAP[“s”]:
def draw(canvas): paddle1_vel += acc
global score1, score2, paddle1_pos, elif key==simplegui.KEY_MAP[“down”]:
paddle2_pos, tux_pos, tux_vel paddle2_vel += acc
if paddle1_pos > (h - (pad_h/2)): elif key==simplegui.KEY_MAP[“up”]:
paddle1_pos = (h - (pad_h/2)) paddle2_vel -= acc
elif paddle1_pos < (pad_h/2):
paddle1_pos = (pad_h/2) def keyup(key):
else: global paddle1_vel, paddle2_vel
paddle1_pos += paddle1_vel acc = 0
if paddle2_pos > (h - (pad_h/2)): if key == simplegui.KEY_MAP[“w”]:
paddle2_pos = (h - (pad_h/2)) paddle1_vel = acc
elif paddle2_pos < (pad_h/2): elif key == simplegui.KEY_MAP[“s”]:
paddle2_pos = (pad_h/2) paddle1_vel = acc
else: elif key==simplegui.KEY_MAP[“down”]:
paddle2_pos += paddle2_vel paddle2_vel = acc
canvas.draw_line([w / 2, 0],[w / 2, h], 4, elif key==simplegui.KEY_MAP[“up”]:
“Green”) paddle2_vel = acc
canvas.draw_line([(pad_w/2), paddle1_
pos + (pad_h/2)], [(pad_w/2), paddle1_pos - frame = simplegui.create_frame(“Tux for Two”,
(pad_h/2)], pad_w, “Green”) w, h)
canvas.draw_line([w - (pad_w/2), frame.set_draw_handler(draw)
paddle2_pos + (pad_h/2)], [w - (pad_w/2), frame.set_keydown_handler(keydown)
paddle2_pos - (pad_h/2)], pad_w, “Green”) frame.set_keyup_handler(keyup)
tux_pos[0] += tux_vel[0] tux = simplegui.load_image(‘http://upload.
tux_pos[1] += tux_vel[1] wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/af/Tux.png’)
if tux_pos[1] <= tux_r or tux_pos[1] >=
h - tux_r: start()
tux_vel[1] = -tux_vel[1]*1.1 frame.start()

87
 Create with Python Program a Space Invaders clone

What you’ll need…

Raspbian
www.raspberrypi.org/downloads
Program a Space
Python
www.python.org/doc

Pygame
www.pygame.org/docs
Invaders clone
Write your own RasPi shooter in 300 lines of Python
When you’re learning to program in a new language or trying to master
a new module, experimenting with a familiar and relatively simply
project is a very useful exercise to help expand your understanding of
the tools you’re using. Our Space Invaders clone is one such example
that lends itself perfectly to Python and the Pygame module – it’s a
simple game with almost universally understood rules and logic.
We’ve tried to use many features of Pygame, which is designed to
make the creation of games and interactive applications easier. We’ve
Did you know… extensively used the Sprite class, which saves dozens of lines of extra
Space Invaders was one of the
code in making collision detection simple and updating the screen and
biggest arcade hits in the world. its many actors a single-line command.
It’s a great first game since
everyone knows how to play!
Have fun with the project and make sure you tweak and change
things to make it your own!

Right Pivaders is
a Space Invaders
clone we’ve made
especially for the Pi

88
 Program a Space Invaders clone Create with Python

Full code listing

#!/usr/bin/env python2 if not self.has_moved[1]:
self.rect.y += self.vector[1] *
import pygame, random self.travel[1]
self.vector[0] *= -1
BLACK = (0, 0, 0) self.has_moved = [0, 0]
BLUE = (0, 0, 255) self.speed -= 20
WHITE = (255, 255, 255) if self.speed <= 100:
RED = (255, 0, 0) self.speed = 100
ALIEN_SIZE = (30, 40) self.time = GameState.alien_time
ALIEN_SPACER = 20
BARRIER_ROW = 10 class Ammo(pygame.sprite.Sprite):
BARRIER_COLUMN = 4 def __init__(self, color, (width, height)):
BULLET_SIZE = (5, 10) pygame.sprite.Sprite.__init__(self)
MISSILE_SIZE = (5, 5) self.image = pygame.Surface([width,
BLOCK_SIZE = (10, 10) height])
RES = (800, 600) self.image.fill(color)
self.rect = self.image.get_rect()
class Player(pygame.sprite.Sprite): self.speed = 0
def __init__(self): self.vector = 0
pygame.sprite.Sprite.__init__(self)
self.size = (60, 55) def update(self):
self.rect = self.image.get_rect() self.rect.y += self.vector * self.speed
self.rect.x = (RES[0] / 2) - (self.size if self.rect.y < 0 or self.rect.y > RES[1]:
[0] / 2) self.kill()
self.rect.y = 520
self.travel = 7 class Block(pygame.sprite.Sprite):
self.speed = 350 def __init__(self, color, (width, height)):
self.time = pygame.time.get_ticks() pygame.sprite.Sprite.__init__(self)
self.image = pygame.Surface([width,
def update(self): height])
self.rect.x += GameState.vector * self. self.image.fill(color)
travel self.rect = self.image.get_rect()
if self.rect.x < 0: class GameState:
self.rect.x = 0 pass
elif self.rect.x > RES[0] - self.size[0]:
self.rect.x = RES[0] - self.size[0] class Game(object):
def __init__(self):
class Alien(pygame.sprite.Sprite): pygame.init()
def __init__(self): pygame.font.init()
pygame.sprite.Sprite.__init__(self) self.clock = pygame.time.Clock()
self.size = (ALIEN_SIZE) self.game_font = pygame.font.Font(
self.rect = self.image.get_rect() ‘data/Orbitracer.ttf’, 28)
self.has_moved = [0, 0] self.intro_font = pygame.font.Font(
self.vector = [1, 1] ‘data/Orbitracer.ttf’, 72)
self.travel = [(ALIEN_SIZE[0] - 7), self.screen = pygame.display.set_
ALIEN_SPACER] mode([RES[0], RES[1]])
self.speed = 700 self.time = pygame.time.get_ticks()
self.time = pygame.time.get_ticks() self.refresh_rate = 20
self.rounds_won = 0
def update(self): self.level_up = 50
if GameState.alien_time - self.time > self.score = 0
self.speed: self.lives = 2
if self.has_moved[0] < 12: self.player_group = pygame.sprite.Group()
self.rect.x += self.vector[0] * self. self.alien_group = pygame.sprite.Group()
travel[0] self.bullet_group = pygame.sprite.Group()
self.has_moved[0] +=1 self.missile_group = pygame.sprite.Group()
else: self.barrier_group = pygame.sprite.Group()

89
Continued on page 91
 Create with Python Program a Space Invaders clone

Setting up dependencies Global variables & tuples

01 If you’re looking to get a better understanding of programming games with

Python and Pygame, we strongly recommend you copy the Pivaders code
in this tutorial into your own program. It’s great practice and gives you a chance
05 Once we’ve imported the
modules we need for the
project, there’s quite a long list
to tweak elements of the game to suit you, be it a different ship image, changing of variables in block capitals. The
the difficulty or the ways the alien waves behave. If you just want to play the game, capitals denote that these variables
that’s easily achieved too, though. Either way, the game’s only dependency is are constants (or global variables).
Pygame, which (if it isn’t already) can be installed from the terminal by typing: These are important numbers that
sudo apt-get install python-pygame never change – they represent
things referred to regularly in the
Installation code, like colours, block sizes and
resolution. You’ll also notice that
colours and sizes hold multiple
02 For Pivaders we’ve used Git, a brilliant form of version control used to
safely store the game files and retain historical versions of your code. Git
should already be installed on your Pi; if not, you can acquire it by typing:
numbers in braces – these are tuples.
You could use square brackets (to
sudo apt-get install git make them lists), but we use tuples
As well as acting as caretaker for your code, Git enables you to clone copies here since they’re immutable, which
of other people’s projects so you can work on them, or just use them. To clone means you can’t reassign individual
Pivaders, go to your home folder in the terminal (cd ~), make a directory for the items within them. Perfect for
project (mkdir pivaders), enter the directory (cd pivaders) and type: constants, which aren’t designed to
git pull https://github.com/russb78/pivaders.git change anyway.

Testing Pivaders Classes – part 1

03 With Pygame installed and the project cloned to your machine (you can also
find the .zip on this issue’s cover DVD – simply unpack it and copy it to your
home directory to use it), you can take it for a quick test drive to make sure everything’s
06 A class is essentially a
blueprint for an object you’d
like to make. In the case of our player,
set up properly. All you need to do is type python pivaders.py from within the it contains all the required info, from
pivaders directory in the terminal to get started. You can start the game with the which you can make multiple copies
space bar, shoot with the same button and simply use the left and right arrows on (we create a player instance in the
your keyboard to move your ship left and right. make_player() method halfway
through the project). The great thing
about the classes in Pivaders is that
Creating your own clone they inherit lots of capabilities and
shortcuts from Pygame’s Sprite class,

04 Once you’ve racked up a good high score (anything over 2,000 points is
respectable) and got to know our simple implementation, you’ll get more
from following along with and exploring the code and our brief explanations of
as denoted by the pygame.sprite.
Sprite found within the braces of the
first line of the class. You can read
what’s going on. For those who want to make their own project, create a new the docs to learn more about the
project folder and use either IDLE or Leafpad (or perhaps install Geany) to create Sprite class via
and save a .py file of your own. www.pygame.org/docs/ref/sprite.html.

“We’ve tried to use many features of

Pygame, which is designed to make
the creation of games and interactive
applications easier”
90
 Program a Space Invaders clone Create with Python
Continued from page 89

self.all_sprite_list = pygame.sprite. self.screen.blit(self.game_font.render(

Group() “PRESS SPACE TO PLAY”, 1, WHITE),
self.intro_screen = pygame.image.load( (274, 191))
‘data/start_screen.jpg’).convert() pygame.display.flip()
self.background = pygame.image.load( self.control()
‘data/Space-Background.jpg’).convert()
pygame.display.set_caption(‘Pivaders - def make_player(self):
ESC to exit’) self.player = Player()
pygame.mouse.set_visible(False) self.player_group.add(self.player)
Player.image = pygame.image.load( self.all_sprite_list.add(self.player)
‘data/ship.png’).convert()
Player.image.set_colorkey(BLACK) def refresh_screen(self):
Alien.image = pygame.image.load( self.all_sprite_list.draw(self.screen)
‘data/Spaceship16.png’).convert() self.refresh_scores()
Alien.image.set_colorkey(WHITE) pygame.display.flip()
GameState.end_game = False self.screen.blit(self.background, [0, 0])
GameState.start_screen = True self.clock.tick(self.refresh_rate)
GameState.vector = 0
GameState.shoot_bullet = False def refresh_scores(self):
self.screen.blit(self.game_font.render(
def control(self): “SCORE “ + str(self.score), 1, WHITE),
for event in pygame.event.get(): (10, 8))
if event.type == pygame.QUIT: self.screen.blit(self.game_font.render(
GameState.start_screen = False “LIVES “ + str(self.lives + 1), 1, RED),
GameState.end_game = True (355, 575))
if event.type == pygame.KEYDOWN \
and event.key == pygame.K_ESCAPE: def alien_wave(self, speed):
if GameState.start_screen: for column in range(BARRIER_COLUMN):
GameState.start_screen = False for row in range(BARRIER_ROW):
GameState.end_game = True alien = Alien()
self.kill_all() alien.rect.y = 65 + (column * (
else: ALIEN_SIZE[1] + ALIEN_SPACER))
GameState.start_screen = True alien.rect.x = ALIEN_SPACER + (
self.keys = pygame.key.get_pressed() row * (ALIEN_SIZE[0] + ALIEN_SPACER))
if self.keys[pygame.K_LEFT]: self.alien_group.add(alien)
GameState.vector = -1 self.all_sprite_list.add(alien)
elif self.keys[pygame.K_RIGHT]: alien.speed -= speed
GameState.vector = 1
else: def make_bullet(self):
GameState.vector = 0 if GameState.game_time - self.player.
if self.keys[pygame.K_SPACE]: time > self.player.speed:
if GameState.start_screen: bullet = Ammo(BLUE, BULLET_SIZE)
GameState.start_screen = False bullet.vector = -1
self.lives = 2 bullet.speed = 26
self.score = 0 bullet.rect.x = self.player.rect.x + 28
self.make_player() bullet.rect.y = self.player.rect.y
self.make_defenses() self.bullet_group.add(bullet)
self.alien_wave(0) self.all_sprite_list.add(bullet)
else: self.player.time = GameState.game_time
GameState.shoot_bullet = True GameState.shoot_bullet = False

def splash_screen(self): def make_missile(self):

while GameState.start_screen: if len(self.alien_group):
self.kill_all() shoot = random.random()
self.screen.blit(self.intro_screen, if shoot <= 0.05:
[0, 0]) shooter = random.choice([
self.screen.blit(self.intro_font.render( alien for alien in self.alien_group])
“PIVADERS”, 1, WHITE), (265, 120)) missile = Ammo(RED, MISSILE_SIZE)

91 Continued on page 93
 Create with Python Program a Space Invaders clone

Classes – part 2 Main loop key

logic – part 1
07 In Pivader’s classes, besides creating the required attributes for the object,
you’ll also notice all the classes have an update() method apart from the
Block class (a method is a function within a class). The update() method is called 11 Firstly the game checks that
the end_game attribute is
in every loop through the main game and simply asks the iteration of the class false – if it’s true, the entire loop in
we’ve created to move. In the case of a bullet from the Ammo class, we’re asking it main_loop() is skipped and we go
to move down the screen. If it goes off either end, we destroy it. straight to pygame.quit(), exiting the
game. This flag is set to true only if
the player closes the game window
or presses the Esc key when on the
start_screen. Assuming end_game
and start_screen are false, the main
loop can start proper, with the
control() method, which checks to see
if the location of the player needs to
change. Next we attempt to make an
enemy missile and we use the random
module to limit the number of missiles
that can be created. Next we call the
update() method for each and every
actor on the screen using a simple for
loop. This makes sure everyone’s up
to date and moved before we check
collisions in calc_collisions().
Ammo
Main loop key
08 What’s most interesting about classes, though, is that you can use one class
to create lots of different things. You could, for example, have a pet class.
From that class you could create a cat (that meows) and a dog (that barks). They’re
logic – part 2
different in many ways, but they’re both furry and have four legs, so can be created
from the same parent class. We’ve done exactly that with our Ammo class, using it to
create both the player bullets and the alien missiles. They’re different colours and they
12 Once collisions have been
calculated, we need to
see if the game is still meant to
shoot in opposite directions, but they’re fundamentally one and the same. continue. We do so with is_dead()
and defenses_breached() – if either
The game of these methods returns true, we
know we need to return to the start

09 Our final class is called Game. This is where all the main functionality of
the game itself comes in, but remember, so far this is still just a list of
ingredients – nothing can actually happen until a ‘Game’ object is created (right
screen. On the other hand, we also
need to check to see if we’ve killed all
the aliens, from within win_round().
at the bottom of the code). The Game class is where the central mass of the Assuming we’re not dead, but the
game resides, so we initialise Pygame, set the imagery for our protagonist and aliens are, we know we can call the
extraterrestrial antagonist and create some GameState attributes that we use to next_round() method, which creates
control key aspects of external classes, like changing the player’s vector (direction). a fresh batch of aliens and increases
their speed around the screen. Finally,
The main loop we refresh the screen so everything
that’s been moved, shot or killed can

10 There are a lot of methods (class functions) in the Game class, and each is
designed to control a particular aspect of either setting up the game or
the gameplay itself. The logic that dictates what happens within any one round
be updated or removed from the
screen. Remember, the main loop
happens 20 times a second – so the
of the game is contained in the main_loop() method right at the bottom of the fact we don’t call for the screen to
pivaders.py script and is the key to unlocking exactly what variables and functions update right at the end of the loop is
you need for your game. of no consequence.

92
 Program a Space Invaders clone Create with Python
Continued from page 91

missile.vector = 1 self.refresh_screen()
missile.rect.x = shooter.rect.x + 15 pygame.time.delay(3000)
missile.rect.y = shooter.rect.y + 40 return True
missile.speed = 10
self.missile_group.add(missile) def calc_collisions(self):
self.all_sprite_list.add(missile) pygame.sprite.groupcollide(
self.missile_group, self.barrier_group,
def make_barrier(self, columns, rows, spacer): True, True)
for column in range(columns): pygame.sprite.groupcollide(
for row in range(rows): self.bullet_group, self.barrier_group,
barrier = Block(WHITE, (BLOCK_SIZE)) True, True)
barrier.rect.x = 55 + (200 * spacer) if pygame.sprite.groupcollide(
+ (row * 10) self.bullet_group, self.alien_group,
barrier.rect.y = 450 + (column * 10) True, True):
self.barrier_group.add(barrier) self.score += 10
self.all_sprite_list.add(barrier) if pygame.sprite.groupcollide(
self.player_group, self.missile_group,
def make_defenses(self): False, True):
for spacing, spacing in self.lives -= 1
enumerate(xrange(4)):
self.make_barrier(3, 9, spacing) def next_round(self):
for actor in [self.missile_group,
def kill_all(self): self.barrier_group, self.bullet_group]:
for items in [self.bullet_group, self. for i in actor:
player_group, i.kill()
self.alien_group, self.missile_group, self.alien_wave(self.level_up)
self.barrier_group]: self.make_defenses()
for i in items: self.level_up += 50
i.kill()
def main_loop(self):
def is_dead(self): while not GameState.end_game:
if self.lives < 0: while not GameState.start_screen:
self.screen.blit(self.game_font.render( GameState.game_time = pygame.time.
“The war is lost! You scored: “ + str( get_ticks()
self.score), 1, RED), (250, 15)) GameState.alien_time = pygame.time.
self.rounds_won = 0 get_ticks()
self.refresh_screen() self.control()
pygame.time.delay(3000) self.make_missile()
return True for actor in [self.player_group,
self.bullet_group,
def win_round(self): self.alien_group, self.missile_group]:
if len(self.alien_group) < 1: for i in actor:
self.rounds_won += 1 i.update()
self.screen.blit(self.game_font.render( if GameState.shoot_bullet:
“You won round “ + str(self.rounds_won) + self.make_bullet()
“ but the battle rages on”, 1, RED), self.calc_collisions()
(200, 15)) if self.is_dead() or self.defenses_
self.refresh_screen() breached():
pygame.time.delay(3000) GameState.start_screen = True
return True if self.win_round():
self.next_round()
def defenses_breached(self): self.refresh_screen()
for alien in self.alien_group: self.splash_screen()
if alien.rect.y > 410: pygame.quit()
self.screen.blit(self.game_font.render(
“The aliens have breached Earth if __name__ == ‘__main__’:
defenses!”, pv = Game()
1, RED), (180, 15)) pv.main_loop()

93
 Create with Python Pivaders part 2: graphics and sound

What you’ll need…

Raspbian
www.raspberrypi.org/downloads
Pivaders Pt 2:
Python
www.python.org/doc

Pygame
www.pygame.org/docs

Art assets
graphics & sound
opengameart.org This time we’ll expand our Space Invaders clone to
include immersive animation and sound

We had great fun creating our basic Space Invaders clone, Pivaders,
in the previous guide. Pygame’s ability to group, manage and detect
collisions thanks to the Sprite class really made a great difference to
our project, not just in terms of code length, but in simplicity too. If
you missed the first part of the project, you can find the v0.1 code
listing on GitHub via git.io/cBVTBg, while you can find version v0.2
of the code, including all the images, music and sound effects we’ve
used at git.io/8QsK-w.
To help keep our project code manageable and straightforward
(as your projects grow keeping your code easy to follow becomes
increasingly harder) we integrated a few animation methods into
Did you know… our Game class and opted to use a sprite sheet. Not only does it
make it very easy to draw to the screen, but it also keeps the asset
Space Invaders is one of
the most cloned games in the count under control and keeps performance levels up, which is
world! It makes a great first especially important for the Raspberry Pi. We hope you have fun
project for game programmers.
using our techniques to add animation and sound to your projects!

Setting up dependencies Downloading pivaders Navigating the project

01 You’ll get much more from

the exercise if you download
the code (git.io/8QsK-w) and use
02 Git is a superb version
control solution that helps
programmers safely store their code
03 Within pivaders sits a licence,
readme and a second pivaders
folder. This contains the main game
it for reference as you create your and associated files. Not only does file, pivaders.py, which launches the
own animations and sound effects. it help you retain a full history of application. Within the data folder
Regardless of whether you just want changes, it means you can ‘clone’ you’ll find subfolders for both graphics
to simply preview and play or walk- entire projects to use and work on and sound assets, as well as the font
through the code to get a better from places like github.com. To clone we’ve used for the title screen and
understanding of basic game creation, the version of the project we created scores. To take pivaders for a test-drive,
you’re still going to need to satisfy for this tutorial, go to your home simply enter the pivaders subdirectory
some basic dependencies. The two folder from the command line (cd ~) (cd pivaders/pivaders) and type:
key requirements here are Pygame and type: python pivaders.py
and Git, both of which are installed git pull https://github.com/ Use the arrow keys to steer left and
by default on up-to-date Raspbian russb78/pivaders.git right and the space bar to shoot. You
installations. That’s easy! This creates a folder called pivaders. can quit with the Escape key.

94
 Pivaders part 2: graphics and sound Create with Python

Code listing (starting from line 87) Animation & sound

class Game(object): 04 Compared with the game from

last month’s tutorial, you’ll see
it’s now a much more dynamic project.
def __init__(self):
pygame.init() The ship now leans into the turns as
pygame.font.init() you change direction and corrects
self.clock = pygame.time.Clock() itself when stationary. When you shoot
self.game_font = pygame.font.Font( an alien ship, it explodes with several
‘data/Orbitracer.ttf’, 28) frames of animation and should you
self.intro_font = pygame.font.Font( take fire, a smaller explosion occurs on
‘data/Orbitracer.ttf’, 72)
self.screen = pygame.display.set_mode([RES[0], RES[1]]) your ship. Music, lasers and explosion
self.time = pygame.time.get_ticks() sound effects also accompany the
self.refresh_rate = 20; self.rounds_won = 0 animations as they happen.
self.level_up = 50; self.score = 0
self.lives = 2 Finding images to animate
self.player_group = pygame.sprite.Group()
self.alien_group = pygame.sprite.Group()
self.bullet_group = pygame.sprite.Group()
self.missile_group = pygame.sprite.Group() 05 Before we can program
anything, it’s wise to have
assets set up correctly. We’ve opted to
self.barrier_group = pygame.sprite.Group()
self.all_sprite_list = pygame.sprite.Group() use sprite sheets; these can be found
self.intro_screen = pygame.image.load( online or created with GIMP with a
‘data/graphics/start_screen.jpg’).convert() little practice. They’re a mosaic made
self.background = pygame.image.load( up of individual ‘frames’ of equally
‘data/graphics/Space-Background.jpg’).convert() sized and spaced images representing
pygame.display.set_caption(‘Pivaders - ESC to exit’) each frame. We found ours at
pygame.mouse.set_visible(False)
Alien.image = pygame.image.load( opengameart.org.
‘data/graphics/Spaceship16.png’).convert()
Alien.image.set_colorkey(WHITE) Tweaking assets
self.ani_pos = 5 # 11 images of ship
self.ship_sheet = pygame.image.load(
‘data/graphics/ship_sheet_final.png’).convert_alpha()
Player.image = self.ship_sheet.subsurface(
06 While many of the assets you’ll
find online can be used as is,
you may want to import them into an
self.ani_pos*64, 0, 64, 61)
self.animate_right = False image-editing application like GIMP to
self.animate_left = False configure them to suit your needs. We
self.explosion_sheet = pygame.image.load( started with the central ship sprite and
‘data/graphics/explosion_new1.png’).convert_alpha() centred it into a new window. We set
self.explosion_image = self.explosion_sheet.subsurface( the size and width of the frame and
0, 0, 79, 96) then copy-pasted the other frames
self.alien_explosion_sheet = pygame.image.load( either side of it. We ended up with 11
‘data/graphics/alien_explosion.png’)
frames of exactly the same size and
self.alien_explode_graphics = self.alien_explosion_sheet.
subsurface(0, 0, 94, 96) width in a single document. Pixel-
self.explode = False perfect precision on size and width is
self.explode_pos = 0; self.alien_explode = False key, so we can just multiply it to find
self.alien_explode_pos = 0 the next frame.
pygame.mixer.music.load(‘data/sound/10_Arpanauts.ogg’)
pygame.mixer.music.play(-1)
pygame.mixer.music.set_volume(0.7)
self.bullet_fx = pygame.mixer.Sound(
‘data/sound/medetix__pc-bitcrushed-lazer-beam.ogg’)
self.explosion_fx = pygame.mixer.Sound(
‘data/sound/timgormly__8-bit-explosion.ogg’)
self.explosion_fx.set_volume(0.5)
self.explodey_alien = []

95
Continued on page 96
 Create with Python Pivaders part 2: graphics and sound

Loading the sprite sheet GameState.end_game = False

GameState.start_screen = True
GameState.vector = 0
07 Since we’re inheriting from
the Sprite class to create our
Player class, we can easily alter how the
GameState.shoot_bullet = False

def control(self):
player looks on screen by changing for event in pygame.event.get():
Player.image. First, we need to load our if event.type == pygame.QUIT:
ship sprite sheet with pygame.image. GameState.start_screen = False
load(). Since we made our sheet with GameState.end_game = True
a transparent background, we can if event.type == pygame.KEYDOWN \
append .convert_alpha() to the end
and event.key == pygame.K_ESCAPE:
if GameState.start_screen:
of the line so the ship frames render GameState.start_screen = False
correctly (without any background). We GameState.end_game = True
then use subsurface to set the initial self.kill_all()
Player.image to the middle ship sprite else:
on the sheet. This is set by self.ani_pos, GameState.start_screen = True
which has an initial value of 5. Changing self.keys = pygame.key.get_pressed()
this value will alter the ship image if self.keys[pygame.K_LEFT]:
drawn to the screen: ‘0’ would draw it
GameState.vector = -1
self.animate_left = True
leaning fully left, ‘11’ fully to the right. self.animate_right = False
elif self.keys[pygame.K_RIGHT]:
Animation flags GameState.vector = 1
self.animate_right = True
self.animate_left = False
08 Slightly further down the list
in the initialising code for the
Game class, we also set two flags for
else:
GameState.vector = 0
self.animate_right = False
our player animation: self.animate_left self.animate_left = False
and self.animate_right. As you’ll see in
the Control method of our Game class, if self.keys[pygame.K_SPACE]:
we use these to ‘flag’ when we want if GameState.start_screen:
animations to happen with True and GameState.start_screen = False
False. It also allows us to ‘automatically’ self.lives = 2
self.score = 0
animate the player sprite back to its self.make_player()
natural resting state (otherwise the self.make_defenses()
ship will continue to look as if it’s flying self.alien_wave(0)
left when it has stopped). else:
GameState.shoot_bullet = True
self.bullet_fx.play()
The animation method
def animate_player(self):

09 We use flags again in the code

for the player: animate_player().
Here we use nested if statements to
if self.animate_right:
if self.ani_pos < 10:
Player.image = self.ship_sheet.subsurface(
control the animation and physically self.ani_pos*64, 0, 64, 61)
self.ani_pos += 1
set the player image. It states that if the
else:
animate_right flag is True and if the if self.ani_pos > 5:
current animation position is different self.ani_pos -= 1
to what we want, we incrementally Player.image = self.ship_sheet.subsurface(
increase the ani_pos variable and set self.ani_pos*64, 0, 64, 61)
the player’s image. The Else statement
then animates the ship sprite back to if self.animate_left:
its resting state and the same logic is if self.ani_pos > 0:
self.ani_pos -= 1
then applied in the opposite direction.

96
 Pivaders part 2: graphics and sound Create with Python

Player.image = self.ship_sheet.subsurface( Animating explosions

self.ani_pos*64, 0, 64, 61)
else:
if self.ani_pos < 5:
Player.image = self.ship_sheet.subsurface( 10 The player_explosion() and
alien_explosion() methods
that come after the player animation
self.ani_pos*64, 0, 64, 61)
self.ani_pos += 1 block in the Game class are similar but
simpler executions of the same thing.
def player_explosion(self): As we only need to run through the
if self.explode: same predefined set of frames (this
if self.explode_pos < 8: time vertically), we only need to see if
self.explosion_image = self.explosion_sheet. the self.explode and self.alien_explode
subsurface(0, self.explode_pos*96, 79, 96)
self.explode_pos += 1 flags are True before we increment the
self.screen.blit(self.explosion_image, [self.player. variables that change the image.
rect.x -10, self.player.rect.y - 30])
else: Adding music
self.explode = False
self.explode_pos = 0

def alien_explosion(self):
11 Pygame makes it easy to add a
musical score to a project. Just
obtain a suitable piece of music in
if self.alien_explode:
if self.alien_explode_pos < 9: your preferred format (we found ours
self.alien_explode_graphics = self.alien_ via freemusicarchive.org) and load it
explosion_ sheet.subsurface(0, self.alien_explode_pos*96, 94, using the Mixer Pygame class. As it’s
96) already been initialised via pygame.
self.alien_explode_pos += 1 init(), we can go ahead and load the
self.screen.blit(self.alien_explode_graphics, music. The music.play(-1) requests
[int(self. explodey_alien[0]) - 50 , int(self.explodey_alien[1]) - that the music should start with the
60])
app and continue to loop until it quits.
else:
self.alien_explode = False If we replaced -1 with 5, the music
self.alien_explode_pos = 0 would loop five times before ending.
self.explodey_alien = [] Learn more about the Mixer class via
www.pygame.org/docs/ref/
def splash_screen(self): mixer.html.
while GameState.start_screen:
self.kill_all()
self.screen.blit(self.intro_screen, [0, 0]) Using sound effects
self.screen.blit(self.intro_font.render(
“PIVADERS”, 1, WHITE), (265, 120))
self.screen.blit(self.game_font.render(
“PRESS SPACE TO PLAY”, 1, WHITE), (274, 191))
12 Loading and using sounds
is similar to how we do so
for images in Pygame. First we load
pygame.display.flip()
self.control() the sound effect using a simple
self.clock.tick(self.refresh_rate / 2) assignment. For the laser beam, the
initialisation looks like this:
def make_player(self): self.bullet_fx = pygame.
self.player = Player() mixer.Sound(‘location/of/file’)
Find the rest of the code at github.com/russb78/pivaders Then we simply trigger the sound
effect at the appropriate time. In the
case of the laser, we want it to play
“Sprite sheets make it easy to draw to the whenever we press the space bar
to shoot, so we place it in the Game
screen, but it also keeps the asset count class’s Control method, straight
down and performance levels up” after we raise the shoot_bullet
flag. You can get different sounds
from www.freesound.org.

97
 Create with Python Make a visual novel game

What you’ll need…

Python
www.python.org/doc
Make a visual
Pygame
www.pygame.org/docs

IDLE Python IDE

Game assets
novel game
Code from FileSilo (optional) Bridge the gap between books and videogames by
creating an interactive novel with Python
Most people look for a compelling story in modern videogames, and
those that don’t have one are appearing less and less. A great way to tell
a pure story is through the genre of visual novels, and you can make one
fairly simply in Python. These interactive novels are an extremely popular
form of entertainment in Japan, and usually work by having the player
click through a story and make decisions as they go along in order to
experience different plot points and endings.
In Python, this is a relatively simple project to create, but with the
addition of the Pygame module we can make it easier still, and even
more expandable for the future. Pygame adds better support for
positioning the images and text, creating display windows and using
mouse and keyboard inputs, thereby simplifying the coding process.
We’ll be coding this in standard Python 2, so make sure to run it in IDLE
2 and not IDLE 3 while you are writing, testing and coding.

98
 Make a visual novel game Create with Python

Get Pygame dependencies

01 The best way to install Pygame

for your system is to compile
it. To do this you need to first install
the right dependencies. Open up
the terminal and install the following
packages, which in Ubuntu looks like:

$ sudo apt-get install

mercurial python-dev
python-numpy libav-tools
libsdl-image1.2-dev libsdl-
mixer1.2-dev libsdl-ttf2.0-dev
libsmpeg-dev libsdl1.2-dev Install in other ways
libportmidi-dev libswscale-dev
libavformat-dev libavcodec-dev

Get the Pygame code 04 If the above doesn’t work (or is

a bit daunting) you can check
the website for binary and executable
files that will work on other operating

02 Next we need to download

the code for Pygame direct
from the source. Still in the terminal,
systems and Linux distros. Head to
http://pygame.org/download.shtml to Understand the script file
get the files you need for your specific
you can do this by typing in: system, including Windows and OS

$ hg clone https://bitbucket.
X. The rest of the tutorial will work in
any OS.
06 For the moment the
script file is small and
literally just holds the script for
org/pygame/pygame
the game. It’s made up of events
Which will download it to the folder for the visual novel to move
‘pygame’. Move to that using CD between, line by line, by splitting
pygame in the terminal so we can it up into scenes. This includes
continue building it. the location of each line, the
character, the actual line itself
and information on how the
Build the Pygame module game flows. These are matrices
with the information in, and are
03 To install it, we need to do it in two
steps. First we need to prepare the
code to install using the terminal with:
Get the visual novel files completely customisable.

$ python setup.py build 05 We’ve uploaded the code to

FileSilo, and here we’re going
to walk you through what we’ve
“Pygame adds
Once that’s finished you can then actually done to make it work. Download the
files for the visual novel and unzip
better support for
install it with:
them. The two files we care about positioning the
$ sudo python setup.py install for the moment are the visualnovel.
py and script.py python files – this is
images and text”
This won’t take too long. where all the important code is.

99
 Create with Python Make a visual novel game

How the script relates

07 In our game, the code pulls

in elements from the script
file as it goes. We’ll explain how
that works later, but this also allows
us to implement decisions later
on to change which direction the
game might take you in.
See the mouse First screen

Starting the main game 11 As we’ve created the button

as a rectangle and now an
image on the menu, we need
13 The first screen is handled
differently, and acts to get every
element up on the interface – it makes
to recognise when the mouse is the code take a little less time to process

08 We don’t need many

modules for the current
state of the visual novel. Here
hovering over it to know when the
button is clicked. First we have to
as we begin. The getattr allows us to
use the string/integer associated with
use event.get() to see the mouse our place in the story and call upon
we’ve imported the new Pygame the relevant scene function from the
in general, then we look for the
module, our script as a module script file.
position with get_pos(). After that,
and the time module for aesthetic We then use an if statement with an
we wait for it to click, see where it
reasons – we’re going to have the iterative function to successively add
clicked (using the co-ordinates of
code pause in bits rather than just screen elements to give the illusion that
the rectangle) and make a decision
instantly change scenes to the next it’s building up the first screen. We finish
after that.
line. We also initialise Pygame with it by advancing the progression value.
a simple pygame.init()
Start the story
Add variables and assets “Our next if
12 Our start_game function is
called when the mouse clicks
statement and
09 We add a mixture of
information we need to run
the novel. We define the size of the
the right position and we prepare
the game, getting the characters,
iteration checks
locations and progression through
display screen to use (1000 pixels
wide and 563 high), along with
the game script. The rest of this
function uses this info to pull in data
what is different on
some RGB colours for the code to
use. We’re also telling Pygame what
from the script to make the game the next line”
flow properly.
font to use and how large for certain
sections and also loading images for
the game.

Start the game

10 Pygame works by constantly

updating the display with
new information. The menu
function adds elements to the
display (which we’ve titled screen),
like filling it with colour, adding
shapes and using blit to add images
or in this case text. With a buffer of
changes to the screen, update it
with the flip() function.

100
 Make a visual novel game Create with Python

Expand your code

16 The code written is very

expandable, allowing you
to add decisions that are logged
to take you to different scenes (or
routes in visual novel terminology)
and make your game feel more
interactive. This would not require
much more code than the if
statements, and it would also be
The starting function a good way for you to look into
Add variables and assets adding graphical buttons to click
and use the collide function.
14 Similarly to the way that
our original startup code
works, our next if statement and
15 We finish our code bit with
a simple function that starts
off the entire game. This is just to Move the assets
iteration checks to see what is encapsulate the entire code and
different on the next line, and
if it moves to a different scene
function. In addition, it will also
allows us to add different ways of
turning it off in the future. IDLE when
running the file will load everything
17 Currently the code has the
script-specific assets in the
main visualnovel file. These can be
change anything that is different up and then run the game() function moved to the script, allowing you
without filling up the buffer more at the end – this is similar to how you to make the visualnovel file much
than needed. Where we’ve made can add a __main__ function at the more modular so that can you
no change is labelled with a 0 in end which will start the code in the have multiple scripts with different
the scripts. command line. assets to load at startup.

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 Use Python with Pi Create amazing projects

Use Python with Pi

Amazing creations with Python code and Raspberry Pi
From the tutorials up to this point, you’ll have a firm grounding in Python.
Now we’re going to add the Raspberry Pi computer. You’ll discover
exciting projects such as sending SMS texts from your Raspberry Pi to a
mobile phone (p.102), programming a voice synthesiser (p.114), and using
it to get more out of Minecraft (p.116). You’ll also learn how to code a
Twitter bot (p.122), and build your own networked Hi-Fi (p.124).

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Create amazing projects Use Python with Pi

103
 Use Python with Pi Using Python on Raspberry Pi

What you’ll need…

A Raspberry Pi with all
necessary peripherals
Using Python
SD card with
latest Debian image for Pi
www.raspberrypi.org/downloads
on Raspberry Pi
Program in Python with the Raspberry Pi, and lay
the foundations for all your future projects
This tutorial follows on from the one last issue: ‘Setting up the Raspberry
Pi’, where we showed you how to prepare your SD card for use with the
Raspberry Pi. The beauty of using an SD card image is that the operating
system is ready to go and a development environment is already
configured for us.
We’ll use a lightweight integrated development environment (IDE)
called Geany for our Python development. Geany provides a friendlier
interface compared to text-based editors such as nano to make it easier
to get into the swing of things. This tutorial will cover topics such as:

t Basic arithmetic
t Comparison operators, for example ‘equal to’ and ‘not equal to’
t Control structures, for example loops and if statements

By the end, we’ll have an advanced version of our ‘hello world’

application. Let’s dive straight in…

Staying organised

01 We don’t want to have messy folders on our new Pi, so let’s go to the file
manager and organise ourselves. Open the file manager by clicking the icon
next to the menu icon on the bottom left of the screen. Create a new folder by
right-clicking and selecting New>Folder, then type a name and click OK. We created
a folder called Python, and inside that created a folder called Hello World v2.

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 Using Python on Raspberry Pi Use Python with Pi

It’s good practice to describe

what the program’s purpose
is at the top of the file. This
will help you out when
working on larger projects
with multiple files

It’s important to think about

data types. We convert the
number to decimal to make
sure that we
don’t lose any decimal
numbers during arithmetic

The stopping condition

for a while loop has to be
satisfied at some point in the
code; otherwise the loop will
never end!

The print function can only

accept string data types,
so we need to convert any
variables with a number data
type to a string before we
can print them to the screen

Starting Geany

02 Start Geany by going to the LXDE menu and going to Programs. From
here, select Geany. Once you’re in the Geany interface, create a new
Python file from a template by selecting ‘New (with template)>main.py’. Delete
everything in this template apart from the first line: #!/usr/bin/env python. This
line is important because it means you can run the code from the command line
and the Bash shell will know to open it with the Python interpreter.

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 Use Python with Pi Programming in Python on the Raspberry Pi

Saving your work

03 It’s always a good idea to keep

saving your work with Ctrl+S
as you program, because it would
be a shame to lose anything you’ve
been working on. To save your file for
the first time, either press Ctrl+S or
go to the File menu and select Save.
Give the file a sensible name and
save it in the tidy folder structure you
created before. It’s a good habit to be
well organised when programming,
because it makes things much easier
when your projects become bigger
and more complicated.

Setting it up
“It’s a good habit to be well organised
04 Having detailed comments
in your code is important
because it allows you to note down
when programming”
things you find confusing and
document complex procedures. If
another programmer has to work Variables
with your code in the future, they’ll
be extremely grateful. Start by adding
a comment with a description of
what the program will do and your
05 A variable is data that is stored in memory and can be accessed via a
name. Our program is going to start by asking for your first name, store
that in a variable and then print out a welcome message. We’re going to add a
name. All comment lines start with comment that explains this and create a variable called firstName. Notice how
a hash (#) and are not interpreted we’ve capitalised the first letter of the second word to make it easier to read.
as code by the Python interpreter. We want the firstName variable to hold the value returned by a function
We import the sys library so we can called raw_input, that will ask the user for input. The question is passed into the
use the sys.exit function to close the print function within brackets, and because this is a string it is enclosed within
program later on. We also import quotation marks. A string type is basically a collection of characters. Note the extra
everything from the decimal library space we’ve added after the colon because the user types their input straight
because we want to make use of the after this question.
decimal type.

Printing a message

06 Now that we have a value in firstName, we need to output a welcome

message to the screen. We print to the screen in Python using the
print function. The print function is followed by a pair of brackets which
enclose the values to print. When using the addition operator with strings,
they are joined together. Note how firstName doesn’t need to be enclosed
by quotation marks because it is the name of a variable. If it was enclosed in
quotation marks, the text firstName would be output. We finish off by adding
a ‘\n’ character (new line character) to our output to leave one blank line
before we start our next example.

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 Programming in Python on the Raspberry Pi Use Python with Pi

Testing our program

08 Now we’ve done that part, why not test it? It’s worth noting that you have
to save before running the program, or anything you’ve done since you
last saved won’t be interpreted by Python. Run the program by pressing the F5
key. Input your name by typing it and then pressing the Enter key. Once you have
done this, you’ll see a welcome message. If the program exits with the code 0
Fixing a small issue then everything was run successfully. Press Enter to close the terminal.

07 The Debian image that we’re

currently using has a small
misconfiguration issue in Geany. Working with numbers
You’ll know if you have this problem
by trying to run your program with
either the F5 key or going to the
Build menu and selecting Execute.
09 We’re going to ask the user for a number by basically repeating the first
couple of lines we did. Once the user gives us a number, we’ll halve,
square and double it. The raw_input function returns the value that the user input
If the issue is present then nothing as a string. A string is a text-based value so we can’t perform arithmetic on it. The
will happen and you’ll see a message integer type in Python can only store whole numbers whereas the decimal type
saying ‘Could not find terminal: can store numbers with decimals. We’re going to do something called a type
xterm’. Not to worry, it’s easy to fix. cast, which basically converts a value with one type to another type. We’re going
Go to the Edit menu and then select to convert our number string to a decimal value because it’s likely that decimals
Preferences. Go to the Tools tab and will be involved if we are halving numbers. If the number was of an integer type,
change the value for Terminal from any decimal values would simply be cut off the end, without any rounding. This is
xterm to lxterminal. called truncation.

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 Use Python with Pi Programming in Python on the Raspberry Pi

Performing arithmetic

10 The main arithmetic operators in Python are + - / *, the latter two being
divide and multiply respectively. We’ve created three new variables
called numberHalved, numberDoubled and numberSquared. Notice that we
don’t need to specify that they should be decimal because Python gives a
type to its variables from the type of their initial value. The number variable is a
decimal type, so all values returned from performing arithmetic on that number
will also be of a decimal type.

Printing our numbers

11 Now that we have performed our arithmetic, we need to print the results
using the print function. The print function only accepts string values
passed to it. This means that we need to convert each decimal value to a string
using the str() function before they can be printed. We’re using a print statement
with nothing between the quotation marks to print one blank line. This works
because the print function always adds a new line at the end of its output unless
told otherwise, so printing an empty string just prints a new line.
Below The Raspberry Pi takes the ‘Pi’ part
of its name from its compatibility with the
Python programming language

Input validation with While loops and If statements

12 To demonstrate a while loop and if statements, we will output a question

to the user that requires a yes or no answer. We’re going to ask them if
they want to continue – and for this we require either a lower-case ‘yes’, or a
lower-case ‘no’. A while loop is a loop that runs until a condition is met. In
this case, we will create a variable called yesOrNo and the while loop will
run while yesOrNo is false. The yesOrNo variable will be a Boolean type
that can be either True or False. The variable will be initialised with a
value of False, or the while loop will not run.
A while loop has the format ‘while [condition]:’ – where any code that
is part of the while loop needs to be indented in the lines below the
colon. Any code that is not indented will not be part of the while loop.
This is the same for an if statement. The condition is checked with
the comparison operator ‘==’. A single ‘=’ is an assignment operator
whereas a double equals is a comparison operator. Another
common comparison operator is ‘!=’ – which means ‘not equal to’.
We create a variable called ‘result’, which holds the result of the
question, do you want to continue? We then check this result is
valid with an if statement. Notice the ‘or’ operator which allows
two conditions to be tested. If the user inputs a correct value
then we set yesOrNo to True, which stops the while loop on the
next run. Otherwise, we output an error message and the while loop will
run again. The user can use the Ctrl+C command at the terminal to exit the
program at any time.

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 Programming in Python on the Raspberry Pi Use Python with Pi

“The print function always adds a new

line at the end of its output”
Continue or exit?

13 Next we will deal with the

result that was stored during
the while loop with if statements.
If the user typed ‘yes’ then we will
print ‘Continuing’. Otherwise, we will
print ‘Exiting’ and then call the sys.
exit function. You don’t have to do
anything else for the program to Finishing off
continue because it will simply carry
on if the sys.exit function wasn’t called.
This code also shows that the newline 16 The final step is to print that the program is exiting. This is the last line and
we don’t have to do anything else because Python simply finishes when
there are no more lines to interpret.
character \n can be used anywhere in
a string, not just in separate quotation
marks like above.

Loops with numbers

14 We’ll be using a while loop

that uses a number and a <=
(less than or equal to) operator as its
stopping condition. The while loop
will be used to increment the number
by 1, printing the change on each loop
until the stopping condition is met.
The count variable allows us to know
exactly how many times we have
been through the while loop.

Incrementing numbers
with a loop

15 The while loop will run until the

count is 6, meaning that it will
run for a total of 5 times because the
count begins at 1. On each run, the
while loop increments the number
variable and then prints what is Admire your work
being added to the original number,
followed by the result. Finally, the
count is incremented. 17 Now that we’ve finished coding, save any changes you have made and run
your program with the F5 key.

109
 Use Python with Pi Send an SMS from your Pi

What you’ll need…

Raspberry Pi
Twilio account
Send an SMS
from your Pi
Create a program combining Twilio and simple
Python code and send an SMS from your Pi
Text messaging, or SMS (Short Message Service),
has become a staple of everyday communication.
For many of us, not a day will go by without
sending a text message. What began life as a 40
pence message service is now offered by most
tariff providers as an unlimited service.
Twilio, a cloud communications company,
enables you to send SMS messages for free from
your Raspberry Pi to a mobile phone using just
six lines of code. So, you no longer need to be
chained to your mobile while you work, and can
focus on one screen rather than two!

Left With this method, you could get your Pi to drop

you a text when it finishes running a script

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 Send an SMS from your Pi Use Python with Pi

Above You will be able to find your

AccountSid and your Auth Token on the
Set up your Twilio account Twilio dashboard

01 The first step of this project is to register for a Twilio account and Twilio
number. This is free and will enable you to send an SMS to a registered,
verified phone. Once signed up, you will receive a verification code via SMS to the
registered phone. When prompted, enter this onto the Twilio site to authenticate
your account and phone. Go to twilio.com/try-twilio and create your account.

Register and verify mobile numbers

02 Your Twilio account is a trial account (unless you pay the upgrade fee),
which means you can only send and receive communications from a
validated phone number. Enter the phone number of the mobile that you want
to verify, ensuring that you select the correct country code. Twilio will text you a
verification code. Enter this code into the website form and press submit.

The dashboard

03 Once registered and logged in, visit the dashboard page, which will display
your AccountSid and your Auth Token. These are both required to use the
Twilio REST. Keep these secure and private, but be sure to make a note of them as you
will need them for your Python program later.

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 Use Python with Pi Send an SMS from your Pi

Install the software

REST
REST stands for Representational
State Transfer. (It is sometimes
04 Boot up your Raspberry Pi and connect it to the Internet. Before you install
the Twilio software, it is worth updating and upgrading your Pi. In the LX
Terminal, type sudo apt-get update, then sudo apt-get upgrade. Once complete,
spelt “ReST”.) It relies on a
stateless, client-server, cacheable type sudo easy_install twilio or sudo pip install twilio to install the software. (If you
communications protocol – and need to install pip, type sudo apt-get install python-pip python-dev, press Enter,
in virtually all cases, the HTTP then type sudo pip install -U pip.)
protocol is used. REST is an
architecture style for designing
networked applications. Twilio authentication

05 Now you are ready to create the SMS program that will send the text
message to your mobile phone. Open your Python editor and import the
Twilio REST libraries (line one, below). Next, add your AccountSid and Auth Token,
replacing the X with yours, as you will find on your dashboard:

from twilio.rest import TwilioRestClient

account_sid = “XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX”
# Enter Yours
auth_token = “XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX”
Below Twilio, whose website is pictured,
has been used by large corporations like # Enter Yours
Coca Cola, Uber and Nordstrom client = TwilioRestClient(account_sid, auth_token)

112
 Send an SMS from your Pi Use Python with Pi

Send the message

“Twilio provides a wide range of API
codes and reference documents to 08 Now send your message. The
code below is not required,
but useful to indicate your message
create other communication programs” has been sent. Add the lines and save
your program. Ensure your Raspberry
Pi is connected to the Internet and
that your mobile is on, then run your
program. You have just texted from
Create your message your Raspberry Pi!

06 You will probably want to be able to change your text messages

rather than send the same one. Create a new variable in your program
called message. This will prompt you to enter the phrase that you want to
print message.sid
print “Your message is being
sent”
send to the mobile phone. When the program runs, this is the message that print “Check your phone!”
will be sent:

message = raw_input(“Please enter your message”)

Other API and codes

Add your numbers 09 Twilio provides a wide

range of API codes and
reference documents to create

07 To send the message, you need to add the code line below and your
two phone numbers. The first number is your mobile phone number,
which is registered and validated with Twilio (Step 2). The second number is
other communication programs
beyond sending SMS, such as making
phone calls, recording your calls, and
your Twilio account number, which can be retrieved from your dashboard page retrieving data including caller IDs and
under ‘Call the Sandbox number’. Change the Sandbox number to your country call duration.
location and remember to add the international country code. The API also complements a
wide range of other programming
message = client.messages.create(to=“+44YOURMOBNUMBER”, languages, including Ruby, PHP, Java
from_=“+44YOURTWILIONUMBER”, body=message) and Node.js (twilio.com/api).

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 Use Python with Pi Voice synthesizer

What you’ll need…

Portable USB speakers
python-espeak module
Voice
eSpeak
Raspbian (latest image) synthesizer
Add the power of speech to your Raspberry Pi
projects with the versatile eSpeak Python library

We’ve shown how the Raspberry Pi can be used to power all kinds
of projects, but as a tiny computer it can also be the centre of an
Internet of Things in your house too. For these reasons and more,
using the Raspberry Pi for text-to-voice commands could be just
Did you know… what you’re looking for. Due to the Debian base of Raspbian, the
powerful eSpeak library is easily available for anyone looking to
Using eSpeak you can control
the way the words are spoken make use of it. There’s also a module that allows you to use eSpeak
to add emphasis or make the in Python, going beyond the standard command-line prompts so
voice sound different
you can perform automation tasks.

Pi’s first words

02 The eSpeak library is pretty

simple to use – to get it to just
say something, type in the terminal:
$ espeak “[message]”
This will use the library’s defaults
to read whatever is written in the
message, with decent clarity. Though
this simple command is fun, there’s
much more you can do…

Say some more

Everything you’ll need

03 You can change the way
eSpeak will read text with a
number of different options, such as
gender, read speed and even the way

01 We’ll install everything we plan

to use in this tutorial at once.
This includes the eSpeak library and the
it pronounces syllables. For example,
writing the command like so:
$ espeak -ven+f3 -k5 -s150
Python modules we need to show it “[message]”
off. Open the terminal and install with: …will turn the voice female,
$ sudo apt-get install espeak emphasise capital letters and make
python-espeak python-tk the reading slower.

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 Voice synthesizer Use Python with Pi

Taking command Full code listing

with Python
Import the

04 The most basic way to use

eSpeak in Python is to use
subprocess. Import it, then use:
necessary eSspeak
and GUI modules, as
well as the module
from espeak import espeak
from Tkinter import *
from datetime import datetime
subprocess.call([“espeak”, to find out the time
“[options 1]”, “[option def hello_world():
2]”,...”[option n]”, “[your Define the different espeak.synth(“Hello World”)
message here]”) functions that the
interface will use, def time_now():
including a simple t = datetime.now().strftime(“%k %M”)
fixed message, espeak.synth(“The time is %s”%t)
telling the time, and
a custom message def read_text():
text_to_read = input_text.get()
espeak.synth(text_to_read)
Create the basic
window with Tkinter root = Tk()
for your interface, root.title(“Voice box”)
The native tongue as well as creating input_text = StringVar()
the variable for box = Frame(root, height = 200, width =

05 The Python eSpeak module

is quite simple to use to just
convert some text to speech. Try this
text entry 500)
box.pack_propagate(0)
box.pack(padx = 5, pady = 5)
sample code:
from espeak import espeak Label(box, text=”Enter text”).pack()
espeak.synth(“[message]”) entry_text = Entry(box, exportselection =
You can then incorporate this into The text entry 0, textvariable = input_text)
Python, like you would any other appends to the entry_text.pack()
module, for automation. variable we created, entry_ready = Button(box, text = “Read
and each button this”, command = read_text)
calls a specific entry_ready.pack()
function that we
defined above in hello_button = Button(box, text = “Hello
the code World”, command = hello_world)
hello_button.pack()
time_button = Button(box, text = “What’s
the time?”, command = time_now)
time_button.pack()

A voice synthesiser root.mainloop()

06 Using the code listing, we’re

creating a simple interface
with Tkinter with some predetermined
voice buttons and a custom entry “There’s even a module that allows
method. We’re showing how the
eSpeak module can be manipulated you to use eSpeak in Python, so you
to change its output. This can be
used for reading tweets or automated
can perform automated tasks”
messages. Have fun!

115
 Create with Python Visualise music in Minecraft with the PianoHAT

What you’ll need…

PianoHAT Visualise music
in Minecraft with
Raspberry Pi

the PianoHAT
Combine code, Minecraft and the PianoHAT to play
music and create a visualisation of the melody
Pimoroni has created the PianoHAT, the ultimate mini musical
companion for your Raspberry Pi! It is inspired by Zachary Igielman’s
PiPiano and made with his blessing. The HAT consists of a dinky
eight-key piano add-on, with touch-sensitive keys and LEDs.
It can be used for many creative and musical purposes, such
as playing music in Python, controlling software synths on your
Raspberry Pi, taking control of hardware synthesisers, or unlocking
your inner Mozart.
This tutorial will show you how to set up the hardware, introduce
you to the basic features of the software and show you how to
combine these together in Minecraft to create musical blocks and a
visualisation of your melodies. You can view a demonstration video
here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezJgXp01MPk
 Visualise music in Minecraft with the PianoHAT Create with Python

Full code listing Getting started

import
import
pianohat
pygame 01 Pimoroni has made
it extremely easy to
install the software for your
import time
import signal PianoHAT. Assuming you have
import glob not connected your HAT, simply
import os attach the board and boot up your
import re Raspberry Pi. Load the LX Terminal
and update the software; type:
from mcpi import minecraft
mc = minecraft.Minecraft.create() $ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get upgrade
global move
x,y,z = mc.player.getTilePos()
Type the following line to install the
print x,y,z
move = x PianoHat libraries:

BANK = ‘./sounds/’ $ sudo curl -sSL get.

FILETYPES = [‘*.wav’,’*.ogg’] pimoroni.com/pianohat | bash
samples = []
files = [] Follow the instructions displayed.
octave = 0 This will now download the required
octaves = 0 libraries and a selection of programs
to try.
pygame.mixer.pre_init(44100, -16, 1, 512)
pygame.mixer.init()
pygame.mixer.set_num_channels(32)
Basic events
patches = glob.glob(os.path.join(BANK,’*’))
patch_index = 0
02 The software install comes with
a set of four example programs
to get you started and demonstrate the
if len(patches) == 0:
exit(‘You need some patches in {}’.format(BANK)) features and functions of the PianoHAT.
In terms of the code for the Piano,
def natural_sort_key(s, _nsre=re.compile(‘([0-9]+)’)): there are four basic events that you can
return [int(text) if text.isdigit() else text.lower() for control, these are:
text in re.split(_nsre, s)]
on_note – triggers when a piano key is
def load_samples(patch): touched and plays a note.
global samples, files, octaves, octave
files = [] on_octave_up – triggers when the
print(‘Loading Samples from: {}’.format(patch)) Octave Up key is touched and raises the
for filetype in FILETYPES: notes by one octave.
files.extend(glob.glob(os.path.join(patch,filetype)))
files.sort(key=natural_sort_key) on_octave_down – triggers when
octaves = len(files) / 12 the Octave Down key is touched and
samples = [pygame.mixer.Sound(sample) for sample in files] decreases the notes by one octave.
octave = octaves/2
on_instrument – triggers when the
pianohat.auto_leds(True) Instrument key is touched and changes
the sound from a piano to drums.

Continued on page 118

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 Create with Python Visualise music in Minecraft with the PianoHAT
Continued from page 117
Simple Piano def handle_note(channel, pressed):
global move

03 To get used to the PianoHAT

and its features, load the
simplepiano program. This is exactly as
channel = channel + (12*octave)

if channel < len(samples) and pressed:

the name describes: a simple piano. print(‘Playing Sound: {}’.format(files[channel]))
Navigate to the folder home/pi/ print channel
Pimoroni/pianohat, and press F4 ### Saves the channel number / note as a variable to
to start a Terminal session (The HAT compare to block
requires root access and this method Block_number = channel
provides it). Next, load the piano samples[channel].play(loops=0)
program, type sudo python simple- ###Sets block infront of you###
piano.py and press Enter. Wait for the mc.setBlock(move, y+3, z+3, Block_number)
program to run and then play yourself move = move + 1 ###add one to the x pos to move blocks
a little tune. Use the Octave buttons to along in a line
move the note range higher or lower,
and press the Instrument button to def handle_instrument(channel, pressed):
toggle between drums and piano.

Minecraft
Musical silence
The new Raspberry Pi OS image comes with Minecraft and the required
06 Python library pre-installed. If you are using an old OS version, it will be worth
04 The program called leds.py is
useful; when you run this and
press a key or note, the corresponding
downloading and updating to either the new Jessie or Raspbian image downloadable
here: https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/
LED lights up but the note is not Go to the start menus and load Minecraft from the programming tabs. Be aware
‘sounded’. It demonstrates how you that the Minecraft window is a little glitchy when full size and it is recommended to
can separately control the PianoHAT reduce the size so you can view both your Python code and the game at the same
LEDs and the sounds. You can turn all time. Let’s look at some simple Minecraft hacks that will be used in the final Musical
of the LEDs on or off, which is useful for Blocks program.
creating a visual metronome, prompting
a user which key to press next before a
sound is played. Assuming you are still in
the home/pi/Pimoroni/pianohat folder,
type sudo python leds.py in order to
run the program.

Teach yourself to play

05 This neat little program teaches

you to play a well known melody
(can you guess what it is?). Run the
program and the LED for each required
note is lit up, indicating that this is the
key to press. Press the key and the note is
sounded. Once you have done this the
next LED lights up; press this key and the
note plays, and so on. Follow the LEDs
to learn how to play the melody. You
can use this program to experiment and
create your own melody / song trainer.

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 Visualise music in Minecraft with the PianoHAT Create with Python

Importing the modules Finding your location

When playing Minecraft you inhabit a three dimensional environment which is
07 To get used to the PianoHAT
and its features, load the
simplepiano program. This is exactly as
08 measured by the ‘x’ axis, left and right, the ‘y’ axis up and down and the ‘z’ axis for
forward and backwards. As you move along any of these axes, your position is displayed
the name describes: a simple piano. at the top left of the screen as a set of three co-ordinates. These are extremely useful for
Navigate to the folder home/pi/ checking where the player is and can be collected and stored using pos = mc.player.
Pimoroni/pianohat, and press F4 getPos(). This code returns the position of your player and is applied later to the music
to start a Terminal session (The HAT blocks. Try the simple program below for an example of how the positioning works:
requires root access and this method
provides it). Next, load the piano from mcpi import minecraft
program, type sudo python simple- mc = minecraft.Minecraft.create()
piano.py and press Enter. Wait for the
import time
program to run and then play yourself
a little tune. Use the Octave buttons to while True:
move the note range higher or lower, time.sleep(1.0)
and press the Instrument button to pos = mc.player.getPos()
toggle between drums and piano. print pos.x, pos.y, pos.z

“These co-ordinates are extremely useful for checking

where the player is and can be collected and stored”
Grow some flowers

09 Each individual block in

Minecraft has its own ID
number, for example, flowers have
the ID number 38. The code x, y, z
= mc.player.getPos() will get you
the player’s current position in the
world and returns it as a set of simple
co-ordinates: x, y, z.
Now you know where you are
standing in the world, blocks can
be placed using mc.setBlock(x, y,
z, flower). Use the code below in
order to place flowers as you walk
around the world. Try changing the ID
number to place a different block – in
theory you can place anything you
want as you go.

flower = 38
while True:
x, y, z = mc.player getPos()
mc.setBlock(x, y, z, flower)
time.sleep(0.1)

119
 Create with Python Visualise music in Minecraft with the PianoHAT

Creating musical blocks

10 Now that you are more au fait

with the basics of Minecraft
and the PianoHAT, let’s get on with
combining them to create a musical
block. This uses the ID of each note in
the PianoHAT and assigns it to each
individual block. For example, the block
ID 2 is grass and this corresponds to the
note value of C. As you play the piano,
the relevant block is displayed in the
Assign a note to a block
Minecraft world. Open the LX Terminal
and type sudo idle to open Python
with root privileges. Click file open and
12 Next scroll down to the handle-note function, this begins on line 52 of the
final program. After the function name, on the next line, add the global move
variable from the previous step. This is the ‘x’ position of the player. The next line reads
locate the simple-piano program, then
channel = channel + (12*octave): ‘channel’ refers to the number of the note. Move to
open it and save it as a different name.
the If under this line and create a new variable called Block_number which will store
This is what you’ll be using as a template
the channel number, the number of the note to be played.
for the musical block program. Now go
ahead and import the modules and
Minecraft API beginning on line 11 of def handle_note(channel, pressed):
the program. global move
channel = channel + (12*octave)
import mcpi.minecraft as Block_number = channel
minecraft
mc = minecraft.Minecraft.
create() Set the block

Finding your
13 In step nine you learned how to place a block: use this code to place
the block that corresponds to the channel number you stored in the
previous step. Within the if statement on line 56 under the samples[channel].
positon again play(loops=0), add the code to place a block, mc.setBlock(move, y+3, z+3,
Block_number) This places the block into the Minecraft world.

11 Under the line you just entered

and before the line that begins
“BANK”, line 19, create a global variable
if channel < len(samples) and pressed:
print(‘Playing Sound: {}’.format(files[channel]))
called move; this stores the ‘x’ position
of the player. Now find your player’s print channel
position, line two, using the code samples[channel].play(loops=0)
you learnt in step 8. On line three, ###Sets block in front of you###
print the position – this is useful for mc.setBlock(move, y+3, z+3, Block_number)
checking that the position and block
are functioning correctly. These values
should be printed to the Python
console window. Now you have the The block explained
exact position of your player in the
Minecraft world.
14 In the previous step you used the code mc.setBlock(move, y+3, z+3, Block_
number) to play a note and place the block. This is achieved by saving the note
number, for example, note five, into a variable called Block_number. When the program
global move
is run, the code finds your x positon and saves this in a variable called move. This is
x,y,z = mc.player.getTilePos() combined with the set Block code to place the block at your x position. In order for you to
print x,y,z view the musical blocks, each block is moved across three and forward three spaces from
move = x your original starting position.

120
 Visualise music in Minecraft with the PianoHAT Create with Python

Moving the block line forward

Did you know…
15 Once the block is placed, increment the x position by one; this has the effect of
moving the next block forward one space. As you play the notes on the Piano,
a line of corresponding blocks is built, creating a simple graphical visualisation of the
The piano samples are located and
stored in the Pimoroni/pianohat/
sounds folder. Create your own
melody you are playing. You will notice that some of the blocks appear to be missing sounds such as you singing the note
– one of the causes is that there is no block ID number which matches the note ID or playing it on another instrument
number. The second reason for a space is that some of the materials are affected by and you can create your own
gravity. For example, Sand, Water and Mushrooms all fall down from the line leaving personalised piano synth.
an empty space. Under the line mc.setBlock(move, y+3, z+3, Block_number), line 64,
add the code, move = move + 1

mc.setBlock(move, y+3, z+3, Block_number) Posting a message to

move = move + 1 the MC World
mc.postToChat(“Welcome to the music blocks”)
16 The last step is to post a
message to the Minecraft
world to tell the player that the
Piano and musical blocks are
Continued from page 118 ready. On line 86 add the code
mc.postToChat(“Welcome to
musical blocks”). When you run your
global patch_index program you will see the message
if pressed: pop up at the bottom of the world.
patch_index += 1 You can try changing your message or
patch_index %= len(patches) use the same code-line to add other
print(‘Selecting Patch: {}’.format(patches[patch_ custom messages dotted throughout
index])) the game. Once the message is
load_samples(patches[patch_index]) displayed you’ll know that the samples
have been loaded and your Minecraft
def handle_octave_up(channel, pressed): Piano is ready.
global octave
if pressed and octave < octaves:
mc.postToChat(“Welcome to the
octave += 1
music blocks”)
print(‘Selected Octave: {}’.format(octave))

def handle_octave_down(channel, pressed):

global octave Running the music block
if pressed and octave > 0:
octave -= 1
print(‘Selected Octave: {}’.format(octave)) 17 Now that you have completed
the code you’ll need to save it.
Open Minecraft and create a new world.
mc.postToChat(“Welcome to music”) When this has finished loading, press
F5 in IDLE to run your program. Press a
pianohat.on_note(handle_note) key on the piano and look out for the
pianohat.on_octave_up(handle_octave_up) block appearing just above your head.
pianohat.on_octave_down(handle_octave_down) Remember that as the player’s position
pianohat.on_instrument(handle_instrument) is measured only once at the beginning
of the program, the blocks will always
load_samples(patches[patch_index]) be placed from the same starting
reference position. Play your melody to
signal.pause() create a musical visualisation.

121
 Use Python with Pi Code your own Twitter bot

What you’ll need…

Internet connectivity
Latest version of Raspbian
Code your own
www.raspberrypi.org/ downloads

Twitter bot
Create your very own Twitter bot that can retweet
chunks of wisdom from others
Twitter is a useful way of sharing information with the world and it’s
our favourite method of giving our views quickly and conveniently.
Many millions of people use the microblogging platform from
their computers, mobile devices and possibly even have it on
their televisions.
You don’t need to keep pressing that retweet button, though.
With a sprinkling of Python, you can have your Raspberry Pi do it for
you. Here’s how to create your own Twitter bot…

Full code listing

Installing the
required software #!/usr/bin/env python2

# A Twitter Bot for the Raspberry Pi that retweets any

01 Log into the Raspbian system
with the username Pi and the
password raspberry. Get the latest
content from

import sys
package lists using the command
import time
sudo apt-get update. Then install
from datetime import datetime
the Python Package installer using
from twython import Twython
sudo apt-get install python-pip. Once
you’ve done that, run sudo pip install
class bot:
twython to install the Twitter library
def __init__(self, c_key, c_secret, a_token, a_token_
we’ll be using.
secret):
# Create a Twython API instance
Registering your ‘app’ self.api = Twython(c_key, c_secret, a_token,
with Twitter a_token_secret)

02 We need to authenticate with

Twitter using OAuth. Before
this, you need to go to https://dev.
# Make sure we are authenticated correctly
try:
self.api.verify_credentials()
twitter.com/apps and sign in with except:
the account you’d like your Pi to sys.exit(“Authentication Failed”)
tweet from. Click the ‘Create a new
application’ button. We called our self.last_ran = datetime.now()
application ‘LUD Pi Bot’ and set the
website to www.linuxuser.co.uk. @staticmethod

122
 Code your own Twitter bot Use Python with Pi

Creating an access token def timestr_to_datetime(timestr):

# Convert a string like Sat Nov 09 09:29:55 +0000
# 2013 to a datetime object. Get rid of the timezone
03 Go to the Settings tab and
change the Access type
from ‘Read only’ to ‘Read and Write’.
# and make the year the current one
timestr = “{0} {1}”.format(timestr[:19], datetime.
Then click the ‘Update this Twitter now().year)
application’s settings’ button. Next
we create an access token. Click the # We now have Sat Nov 09 09:29:55 2013
‘Create my access token’ button. If you return datetime.strptime(timestr, ‘%a %b %d %H:%M:
refresh the details page, you should %S %Y’)
have a consumer key, a consumer
secret and access token, plus an access def retweet_task(self, screen_name):
token secret. This is everything we # Retweets any tweets we’ve not seen
need to authenticate with Twitter. # from a user
print “Checking for new tweets from 
Authenticating @{0}”.format(screen_name)
with Twitter
# Get a list of the users latest tweets
timeline = self.api.get_user_timeline
04 We’re going to create our
bot as a class, where we
authenticate with Twitter in the
(screen_name = screen_name)

constructor. We take the tokens from # Loop through each tweet and check if it was
the previous steps as parameters and # posted since we were last called
use them to create an instance of the for t in timeline:
Twython API. We also have a variable, tweet_time = bot.timestr_to_datetime
last_ran, which is set to the current (t[‘created_at’])
time. This is used to check if there are if tweet_time > self.last_ran:
new tweets later on. print “Retweeting {0}”.format(t[‘id’])
self.api.retweet(id = t[‘id’])
Retweeting a user
if __name__ == “__main__”:

05 The first thing we need to do

is get a list of the user’s latest
tweets. We then loop through each
# The consumer keys can be found on your application’s
# Details page located at https://dev.twitter.com/
# apps(under “OAuth settings”)
tweet and get its creation time as a c_key=””
string, which is then converted to a c_secret=””
datetime object. We then check that
the tweet’s time is newer than the # The access tokens can be found on your applications’s
time the function was last called – and # Details page located at https://dev.twitter.com/apps
if so, retweet the tweet. # (located under “Your access token”)
a_token=””
The main section a_token_secret=””

06 The main section is

straightforward. We create
an instance of the bot class using our
# Create an instance of the bot class
twitter = bot(c_key, c_secret, a_token, a_token_secret)

tokens, and then go into an infinite # Retweet anything new by @LinuxUserMag every 5 minutes
loop. In this loop, we check for any while True:
new retweets from the users we are # Update the time after each retweet_task so we’re
monitoring (we could run the retweet # only retweeting new stuff
task with different users), then update twitter.retweet_task(“LinuxUserMag”)
the time everything was last run, and twitter.last_ran = datetime.now()
sleep for five minutes. time.sleep(5 * 60)

123
 Use Python with Pi Build your own networked Hi-Fi

What you’ll need…

Github repository
http://github.com/alexellis/pyPlaylist
Build your own
pimoroni pHAT DAC £10-12
pimoroni.com

Soldering iron, flux & solder networked Hi-Fi

with a Pi Zero
Put the Pimoroni pHAT DAC together with a Pi Zero
to create a networked Hi-Fi
Here we will show you how to create a high-quality networked music
player that takes advantage of the UK’s online radio stations, Linux’s
popular Music Player Daemon, and a responsive web-server to control
it all. The full-sized Raspberry Pis have two built-in audio outputs:
audio over HDMI cable and a 3.5mm headphone jack that can suffer
interference and noise. The Pi Zero itself has no audio jacks but Pimoroni
has come to the rescue and built a high-quality DAC (digital audio
converter) using the same chip as the Hi-Fi berry (PCM5102A).

Right You’ll soon have

some of the most popular
radio stations streaming
through your Pi

124
 Build your own networked Hi-Fi Use Python with Pi

Soldering the headers Installing Music Player

Daemon (MPD)
01 The pHAT DAC comes with a 40-pin header, which you’ll need to solder. We
consider a flux pen, work-lamp and thin gauge 60/40 solder essential for this.
An RCA jack can also be bought to give a phono-lead output for older stereos. 03 Now install the MPD
package and enable it
to start on boot. MPD will be
Install drivers the backbone of the project
providing playback of MP3s and
02 The DAC relies on I2C, so we have to load some additional kernel modules. If
you are running Raspbian then you can type in the following for a one-script
installation over secure HTTP:
internet radio stations. The MPC
(client) software is also installed
for debugging and setting up
initial playlists.
curl -sS https://get.pimoroni.com/phatdac | bash
sudo apt-get install mpd mpc
While HTTPS provides a secure download, curious types may want to review the
sudo systemctl enable mpd
script before running it.

“The Pi Zero itself has no audio jacks but Pimoroni has

come to the rescue and built a high-quality DAC using the
same chip as the Hi-Fi berry”

125
 Use Python with Pi Build your own networked Hi-Fi

Clone and install Choosing the radio stations

pyPlaylist web-server
05 We have put together a list of popular radio stations in the UK which
can be run into MPD with the add_stations.sh file. Edit this file or find
04 pyPlaylist is a responsive
(mobile-ready) web-server
written with Python & Flask web
your own from http://radiofeeds.co.uk.

cd ~/pyPlaylist
framework. Once configured it will
give us a way of controlling our ./add_stations.sh
Hi-Fi through a web-browser. The
following will install pyPlaylist on Reviewing the stations
Raspbian:

sudo pip install flask

python-mpd2
06 Each station is added into its own playlist – the mpc ls command shows
which playlists are available:

cd ~
t $ mpc ls
git clone https://github.
com/alexellis/pyPlaylist t BBC6Music
cd pyPlaylist t BBCRadio1
./raspbian_install.sh t BBCRadio2
t BBCRadio4
t CapitalXtra
t KissFM

If you want to remove one of the stations then type in the following:

Auto-starting mpc rm BBC6Music

on Raspbian
In Raspbian/Jessie the
controversial systemd
software was added,
giving a highly modular
way of managing start-up
scripts amongst other
things. While systemd
configuration files are now
considered best practice,
they can take time to fully
understand. For that reason
we would suggest using
cron to start the script
on reboot, at least as a
temporary measure.

crontab -e
@reboot /usr/bin/
python /home/pi/
pyPlaylist/app.py

126
 Build your own networked Hi-Fi Use Python with Pi

“Almost anything with an RCA or Did you know…

3.5mm input source will work when it We wrote pyPlaylist with the
Python flask framework which
comes to adding speakers” is an ideal starting-point for
simple RESTful websites.
The front-end code saves
the screen from completely
reloading by using jQuery
Starting the web-server to update the song or radio
information. Bootstrap has

07 Now that we have some stations, we can run the web-server from the
pyPlaylist directory. Then open up a web browser to start playing a radio
station. The following command reveals your IP address on Raspbian:
been employed to make the
pages responsive (compatible
with your PC, phone and
tablet). The code has been
released under GPL, so why not
$ ./raspbian_get_ip.sh fork the code and tweak it to
192.168.0.20 your own needs?

Once you know the IP address, connect to the URL in a web-

browser on port 5000, i.e.

http://192.168.0.20:5000/

Add a custom music playlist

08 Now put together a sub-directory with your music files under /var/lib/mpd/
music/ and ensure that mpd:audio has access to read it. Then we: update
mpd’s database, clear out the current playlist and add in all the tracks from the new
directory (ambient) finally saving it as a new playlist.

mpc update
mpc clear
mpc ls ambient | mpc add
mpc save ambient station. The following command reveals your IP
address on Raspbian:

$ ./raspbian_get_ip.sh
192.168.0.20

Once you know the IP address, then connect to the URL in a web-browser on port
5000, i.e.

http://192.168.0.20:5000/

Finishing up

09 Now your music player is functioning, all that’s left to do is to add some
speakers, obviously! Almost anything with an RCA or 3.5mm input source
will work for this purpose. That part we will leave up to you. To take a look at the
code here in full, check out our FileSilo. Enjoy the tunes!

127
 of al
r
al ci
fe
tri Spe

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HOW TO USE
EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT
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130
 Python The Complete Manual

L earn to use Python Master building apps

Master the essentials and code simple projects Make your own web and Android apps with
as you learn how to work with one of the most step-by-step tutorials
versatile languages around
Create with Raspberry Pi
Program games Unlock the real potential of your Raspberry Pi
Use what you’ve learnt to create playable games, computer using Python, its officially recognised
and see just how powerful Python can be coding language

Essential tips P

 ut Python to work
Use Python for functional projects such as
Discover everything you need to know about scientific computing and make reading websites
writing clean code, getting the most from offline easier and more enjoyable
Python’s capabilities and much more
F ree online resources
Amazing projects Download all of the tutorial files you need to
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