pcDuino Crowdsource Kiosk

Contributors: Nick Poole

The Interface: Learning Python

After completing the hardware portion of the build, I went on to tackle the software portion. The GUI for the kiosk would need to meet a few basic criteria:

• Easy to Navigate
• Capable of Saving a Form to a File
• Difficult to Exit
• Difficult to Hack (Form Injection Attacks, etc.)
• Cross-Platform (So I can develop on my Windows machine)

I needed a language or tool that would make this GUI (relatively) painless to assemble. I haven't done any not-Arduino programming since... um... BASIC? So it's about time I learned a new language, and I knew just the one I needed: Python.

Why Python? Because Python can do anything. Well, okay, not anything but it is a very nice language for 'banging out' a quick app. There's also a huge collection of libraries available to hook Python into all kinds of things. Not to mention it's cross-platform so I could do all of the development on my Windows machine and load that same script on the pcDuino with no problems.

Sometimes the best way to learn a new programming language is to just jump into your project with both feet. Find some libraries that you think you'll need, open all of the example code, and start taking it apart. If you read a script start to finish, using Google to look up anything you don't understand, you'll have a working understanding of the syntax and methods by the end. From there it's just the same old grind: write, run, get error, debug. Although if you're just moving to Python from C it's more like: write, run, 'really, that worked, huh?'

I started by grabbing easyGUI, an aptly named library for Python that plugs into TkInter (a python binding to the Tk GUI kit) and makes it super easy to display and navigate simple forms. You can do everything I did without easyGUI, but it won't be as easy... GUI...(Where am I?)

It's also very easy to control the pcDuino GPIO from Python. Essentially you're just opening a file and changing a value, it really is that easy. I copy/pasted some code from an example, which puts some definitions at the top of the script allowing you to use HIGH, LOW, INPUT, OUTPUT, etc without having to remember what value represents each.

I'll go ahead and post my code below in chunks (not necessarily in written order but in functional order) then try to explain each bit for the benefit of anyone who isn't familiar with Python. I should warn anyone who is familiar that I usually code in C so my Python isn't very... Pythonic? It does work, though.

Okay, so we have to do a little bit of setup first:

language:python
import easygui as eg
import time, os

# patch rootWindowPosition
eg.rootWindowPosition = "+180+20"

Well that shouldn't be too scary for the Arduino programmers. Just importing a few libraries, the same way you'd use "include". I've already explained the easyGUI library, but the time library just gives me the ability to put delays in the code.

The ugly bit there about a patch is something I stole from a piece of example code to set the window position of my GUI. I was having trouble with my window manager just plopping it down wherever it wanted to, whether everything was on screen or not. The # denotes the start of a comment in Python, by the way.

The next thing to do is to ready the GPIO!

language:python
GPIO_MODE_PATH= os.path.normpath('/sys/devices/virtual/misc/gpio/mode/')
GPIO_PIN_PATH=os.path.normpath('/sys/devices/virtual/misc/gpio/pin/')
GPIO_FILENAME="gpio"

pinMode = []
pinData = []

HIGH = "1"
LOW =  "0"
INPUT = "0"
OUTPUT = "1"
INPUT_PU = "8"

for i in range(0,18):
    pinMode.append(os.path.join(GPIO_MODE_PATH, 'gpio'+str(i)))
    pinData.append(os.path.join(GPIO_PIN_PATH, 'gpio'+str(i)))

for pin in pinMode:
    file = open(pin, 'r+')  ## open the file in r/w mode
    file.write(OUTPUT)      ## set the mode of the pin
    file.close()            ## IMPORTANT- must close file to make changes!

for pin in pinData:
    file = open(pin, 'r+')
    file.write(LOW)
    file.close()

All of that was also stolen from an example script. It basically tells Python where the GPIO control pin files are kept on the pcDuino. Then it defines terms like HIGH and INPUT, and then it uses a series of "for" loops to set the GPIO pins to a known state.

If you're an Arduino programmer then you've probably noticed something crazy by now: there aren't any semicolons! Or curly brackets! Has the world gone mad?? Well, yes, but not for lack of punctuation. Python is dictated by indentation. Code blocks are separated by the level of their indentation.

Okay, we're all done with setup. Let's get something on screen:

language:python
while(1):

    mainTurk()

def mainTurk():
    x = str(eg.buttonbox("", title="Chocolate Turk", image="screen1.jpg", choices = ["Gimme Candy!", "Why?"]))

    if x == "Why?":
        msg = "Chocolate Turk is a Mechanical Turk problem-solver that rewards people with chocolate! \n \n It was built using the pcDuino as a demonstration of the device's capabilities. The control software and interface were programmed in Python with help from the EasyGUI and PIL libraries. \n \n A tutorial on how this project was completed will be made available on the SparkFun Learn site. \n \n Why not give MarComm a hand in advertising? There's chocolate in it for you ;) \n \n Imagined and Executed by: Nick P. \n \n"
        title = "About Chocolate Turk"
    choices = ["Return","Kill Program"]
        killer = eg.buttonbox(msg, title, choices=choices)    

        if killer == "Kill Program":
        sys.exit()
    else:
        pass
    else:
        chocoturk()

"Whoa, whoa, whoa... what?" I know, if you're an Arduino programmer, this can look like a mess at first. No worries, we'll step through it. First of all, I start while(1) loop so the kiosk program will keep running over and over. The next line is a call to eg.buttonbox (if you'll remember we imported easyGUI as "eg") which is a method in easyGUI which creates a dialog box with some buttons. This is one line of condensed code, so it's a little strange looking, but one thing that will help you figure out what's going on is this: x will hold the value of the button that is pressed. If you're wondering where x came from, it didn't! We just made it up! That's right, in Python you don't have to declare a variable, you can just start using it and Python will figure out what you want to do with it.

Sequentially, what's happening is that I'm filling x with the string version of the value of the function call "eg.buttonbox". That function takes a few arguments: the title of the window, the name of the image I want to display, and the choices that I want available. When this string executes, a window called "Chocolate Turk" pops up with an image retrieved from screen1.jpg and two buttons labeled "Gimme Candy!" and "Why?". After one of the buttons is clicked, the function returns that choice to the str(), which "stringifies" it and stuffs it into x.

The next step is to test x. If x is equal to "Why?" (In other words, if the "Why?" button is pressed) then I pop up a screen explaining the project. Just to give you an expanded example I neglected to write this all on one line. You can see that I actually stuffed each variable before making the call to eg.buttonbox. I called the return variable "killer" because it's the only place in the program to kill it. Clicking the "x" on the window won't even do it, because I didn't write anything to handle that. This is a good thing, I didn't want people exiting the GUI on my kiosk.

The else statements afterward just handle what happens if you press "Gimme Candy!" which is, of course, it dumps into the next function, which looks like this:

language:python
def chocoturk():
    msg     = "Pick a product that you feel pretty familiar with:"
    title   = "Pick a card"
    choices = ["pcDuino", "IOIO-OTG", "SparkFun Inventors Kit for Arduino with Retail Case", "Makey Makey - Standard Kit", "LilyPad Arduino Simple Board", "Raspberry Pi - Model B", "9 Degrees of Freedom - Razor IMU", "RedBoard - Programmed with Arduino", "XBee Explorer USB", "EasyDriver Stepper Motor Driver"]
    choic   = eg.choicebox(msg, title, choices)

    if choic == None:
        return

    image   = "%s.jpg" % choic
    msg     = "Wanna write an ad for the %s?" % choic
    choices = ["Let's Do it!","Wait, go back!"]
    reply   = eg.buttonbox(msg,image=image,choices=choices)

    if reply == "Wait, go back!":
        return 
    else:
    val=["","","",""]
        composer(choic, val)

    return

The first thing that I need the user to do is to pick one of our best-selling products, so I line them all up in what easyGUI calls a choicebox. I get a chance to be a little clever after the user picks a product. I saved a picture of each product using the name of the product as the filename. So when I went to retrieve the picture for the next window, I just popped ".jpg" onto the end of the answer from choicebox into the image argument for buttonbox.

I also gave the user a chance to change their mind if they wanted by returning out of the function. If they confirm that they want to continue then I drop into the next function, the composer function.

language:python
def composer(product, retainVal):
    msg         = "Write the AdWords copy for the %s \n \n Formatting: \n \n -Headline \n Limited to 25 characters. Links to the product page. \n \n -Description \n You get 2 lines of 35 characters each to describe a SparkFun product to a targeted shopper using Google search \n \n -Keywords: \n What 5 search terms or phrases when typed into Google, should return your ad? (comma-separated) \n \n" % product
    title       = "AdWords Composer"
    fieldNames  = ["Headline","Description Line 1","Description Line 2","Keywords"]
    fieldValues = [retainVal[0], retainVal[1], retainVal[2], retainVal[3]]
    fieldValues = eg.multenterbox(msg, title, fieldNames, fieldValues)

    if fieldValues == None:
        return

    if len(fieldValues[0]) > 25:
        eg.msgbox("You've got too many characters in your Headline. Pare it down.")
        composer(product, fieldValues)
    if len(fieldValues[1]) > 35:
        eg.msgbox("You've got too many characters in your Description (Line 1). Pare it down.")
        composer(product, fieldValues)
    if len(fieldValues[2]) > 35:
        eg.msgbox("You've got too many characters in your Description (Line 2). Pare it down.")
        composer(product, fieldValues)

    composereview(fieldValues, product)

    return

The composer function is pretty straight-forward. I just need the user to enter some text, this is the task that they're being rewarded for. If you hadn't figured it out by now, it's spelled out in the msg argument: We were trying to get people from outside our marketing department to write ad copy. Since these were theoretically going to appear as AdWords ads, they needed to conform to a certain format. I added some if statements that check the character length of each field before rewarding the user. If there were too many characters in a field, I'd let the user know which one and return them to the form. Finally, if they succeeded in filling out the form I gave them a chance to review what they had written beside a picture of the product:

language:python
def composereview(adcopy, prod):
    image   = "%s.jpg" % prod
    msg     = "Here's what you wrote about the %s: \n \n %s \n %s \n %s \n \n With the keywords: \n \n %s" % (prod, adcopy[0], adcopy[1], adcopy[2], adcopy[3])
    choices = ["Gimme Chocolate NAO!","Let me try again..."]
    reply   = eg.buttonbox(msg,image=image,choices=choices)

    if reply == "Let me try again...":
        composer(prod, adcopy)
    else:
        f = open('AdWordsDump.txt', 'a')
        f.write(prod)
        f.write('\n')
        f.write(adcopy[0])
        f.write('\n')     
        f.write(adcopy[1])
        f.write('\n')     
        f.write(adcopy[2])
        f.write('\n')     
        f.write(adcopy[3])
        f.write('\n')
        f.write('\n')
        f.close()
        givethemthechocolate()

The "compose review" is a simple form that I populate with the answers passed from the composer and a picture of the product using the same name trick as in the product selection window. If the user decides that they like what they've written, I save it into a big .txt file where I store all of the info collected from the kiosk. Oh yeah, and I dump them into the final function:

language:python
def givethemthechocolate():

    file = open(pinData[6], 'r+')
    file.write(HIGH)
    time.sleep(1)
    file = open(pinData[6], 'r+')
    file.write(LOW)
    file.close()
    image   = "thanks.jpg"
    msg     = ""
    choices = ["Finish"]
    eg.buttonbox(msg,image=image,choices=choices)

    mainTurk()

In this function, I simply send the candy dispenser a HIGH pulse, handing over that sweet, sweet candy. I also show the user a thank you image and return to the homescreen.