Ruby Application to switch AC loads (e.g. turn a lamp on and off).

Update 2009-09-26: This has actually become something of a unit-testing light dongle for me. The basic switching hardware was finished quite early, so the only thing left to do was to add a Killer Demo App(TM). The basic switching app is just called “switchy”, and it controls individual pins 1 through 10 on the board.

The Killer Demo, then, would be Sparky, Sparcumber, and Autospark. Each of these has a “christmas tree” LED arrangement: Five LEDs on each side of the device are wired for run, fail, warning, and pass. There are two green LEDs for pass on each side, so the pinouts are:

Pins 1-5 (left side): blue, red, yellow, green, green Pins 10-6 (right side, note reverse order because pin numbering continues clockwise around the board): blue, red, yellow, green, green

Sparky provides an RSpec progress formatter, so that it gets updated as each spec runs. While running it animates the LEDs to show the current overall progress. As each spec finishes an LED of the appropriate color lights up.

Sparky also has a generic mode. If you run “sparky foo”, sparky will turn on the running lights, then run the foo command. When foo finishes, its exit status will be used to turn on either the red or green lights.

Sparcumber does for Cucumber what Sparky does for RSpec. Get Cucumber configured so you can type “cucumber” from the root of your project, then type “sparcumber” instead. Sparcumber will light up the board as Cucumber runs.

Autospark is currently vaporware. All it should do is hook sparky into autospec. Patches are welcome. There is a spec.sparky.opts file in the res folder, however, that will achieve this for now, but it does cause your project to take a dependency on sparky, which in turn requires having the hardware dongle connected to run your specs, which is less than agile.

Switchy gives you control of each light individually.

$ switchy 1 1 2 0 10 1 8 1
# => Lights 1, 8, 10 turn on; light 2 turns off

DANGER: This is wildly incompatible with the original design of switchy. The original design is intended to drive a single external device from a single pin through a relay.

The prototype design, however, ended up getting optimizing for low part count, and in fact I just soldered LEDs directly to the logic board (and there ARE no other parts). This means that each LED is soldered across TWO pins.

Turning on light 1, for instance, involves driving pin C4 high and driving pin C5 low.

Remember that when discussing lights, we turn them on or off, but when discussing the logic pins we drive them high or low, because when you drive a pin low you are actually establishing a connection between that pin and ground, allowing current to “sink”.

A wrapper on top of switchy that gives you pass/pending/fail semantics.

$ sparky (run|pass|pending|fail)
# => turns on running|green|yellow|red lights

$ sparky <system command> [<command options>]

# => Turns on run lights and executise shell command. If the exit
#    code is 0, turns green. Any other exit code and it turns red.

Sparcumber is a cucumber wrapper. It hooks into Cucumber’s AST::Visitor class. Use it like you would use Cucumber:

$ sparcumber -r features features/

One additional bit of cleverness: While running, each step that passes/pends/fails will turn on ONE light of the appropriate color. If another step exits in the same condition, that color light will advance (E.g. the currently lit green light will go out and the next one will turn on). This provides the visual effect of animating the feature output. Note that it is thus possible to 5 leds lit at once: the 2 running lights plus one each of red, yellow and green.

TODO: The ruby lib is pretty messed up. Here’s what currently works:

s = Switchy.new
s.set_pin Switchy::PINS::D6, 0
# Drives pin D6 low (which turns on the on-board LED)
s.set_pin Switchy::PINS::B3, 1
# Drives pin B3 high

…is currently very much in flux.

TODO: Write me!

• There’s an enable line on the 74ls244 driver chip. Use it. Device should boot disabled. Once everything’s had a chance to settle (10-100ms or so), enable the driver chip.

• Add circuit schematics to the project.

• DONE

  Fork the circuit, make a version with just a little LED light

  bar and no 120VAC switching. (Trust me. The little LEDs are VERY compelling!)

• ABANDONED

  Add duty cycling/blinking to the board. (Tabled for now.

  The USB serial port driver that comes with the Teensy board appears to use blocking methods. The code libraries are poorly documented and will require a significantly higher amount of expertise with AVR programming than I currently have before I can port it to a non-blocking form.)

• Write a simulator for the 6.3E+06-1 people on the planet who do not have the only existing prototype. I think a little MacRuby Red/Green/Refactor applet would be spiffy all by itself–and would make debugging/testing driver and linking apps much easier.

• DONE

  2009-04-20: Review previous TODOs in light of first finished

  prototype.

• DONE

  Change progress formatter lights, and light up only one

  pass/fail/pending LED as specs run. As each example completes, animate the display by moving the the one led to another spot. So if all your specs are passing, you’ll see the green light move 1 -> 2 -> 3 -> 4 -> 1 -> 2 etc. If you have any pending specs, they will light up 1 -> 2 -> 1 -> 2 etc. When the test finishes, light up all the status lights of the appropriate color.