The Central Ohio Python User's Group

About Us

We are a friendly and enthusiastic group of Central Ohio Pythonistas. We meet most Thursday evenings for informal dojos, occasionally for lunch on various days of the week, and have a monthly meeting on the last Monday of the month. To have lunch at your favorite place, announce the time and place on the mailing list.

After our monthly meetings we like to adjourn to Brazenhead to enjoy good food, good drinks, and good conversation.

Visit us on meetup.com

We have code on our github repository, especially of challenges where people solved problems using Python in very different ways.

Dojo

New Time and Place!

We meet most Thursday evenings.
6:00 PM to 9:00 PM+
Smokehouse Brewing Company
1130 Dublin Rd
Columbus, OH 43215

Dojos are informal Python group study sessions. Complete beginners, experts, and everyone else are welcome to the Dojos. Bring your Python questions and problems. Digressions from Python are common.

Please bring outlet strips and extension cords.

August Monthly Meeting

August 28, 2017, 6:00 p.m.

18:00 Pillar Technology's 'The Forge' at the Smith Brothers' Hardware Building

20:00 Brazenhead Irish Pub

Come and learn, share, grow, meet new people, and visit old friends at our monthly meeting! We'll be talking about the Python programming language and anything that intersects it, and the cool stuff you can do with it.

This month is "Python vs the Hardware" with Neil Ludban.

Neil will present several short talks around the themes of embedded systems and interfacing Python with unsupported hardware. The focus will be on the software techniques and tools, and should be generally applicable to Python on other hardware and operating systems. These projects are all current works in progress, but live demos will be attempted.

  • Part 1: Using libusb1 to read raw data from HIDs. Human Interface Devices such as gamepads and joysticks are a cost-effective source of switches, sliders, and electronics needed to build a physical interface for your project. We'll use command line utilities to inspect the USB device's descriptors, Python and libusb1 to read packets, and then try to decode the binary output.
  • Part 2-a: FreeBSD on the Raspberry Pi. A short PSA on why you might want to try an alternative OS on your Pi (or desktop), and what to expect if you do.
  • Part 2-b: Hardware debug tools. A quick overview of several ways of inspecting what's going on between components of an electronic circuit.
  • Part 3: I2C serial bus for Python on FreeBSD. Implementing a C extension to work with the native "iic" generic device driver, adding a wrapper to look like the Python on Linux smbus module, then making it work with the https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/four-letter-phat.
  • Part 4: GPIO for Python on FreeBSD. Implementing a C extension to work with the native "gpio" generic device driver, designing a Pythonic package around it, and adding a wrapper to look like the RPi.GPIO package.
  • (maybe) Part 5: Bit-banging SPI over GPIO and making it work with the https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/display-o-tron hat.

Please RSVP so our generous host knows how much pizza and beer to order.

Later, around 8pm, we will go to Brazenhead Irish Pub on Fifth Ave for more socializing, food, and beverages.
map for Brazenhead Irish Pub on Fifth Ave