I recently dug out my USB7 and thought I would play with it. I don’t know if it has to do with my distro (sidux), or the kernel development in general, but the USB7 works on plug in, contrary to what the product site says.

Anyway, once I got tired of echoing numbers to the USB7, I thought I’d try writing something with pySerial, which I had looked at a long time ago, but never tried.

It is remarkably easy once you get the settings right. Here is a little clock program that I wrote which counts up the elapsed seconds in the day, and also has an hour/minutes/seconds layout. These toggle back and forth every 10 seconds.

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import serial
from time import sleep, mktime
from datetime import datetime, date
 
ser = serial.Serial('/dev/ttyACM0', 9600, timeout=0)
try:
  swap = True
  while True:
    now = datetime.now().timetuple()
    now_t = mktime( now )
 
    then_t = mktime(date.today().timetuple() )
    diff = int( now_t - then_t )
 
    if 0 == diff % 10:
      swap = not swap
 
    if swap:
      ser.write( "%d\n" % diff )
    else:
      ser.write( "%02.0d.%02.0d.%02.0d\n" % ( now[3], now[4], now[5] ) )
 
    sleep( 1 )
except:
  ser.close()