Previously I posted an article on handling EV3g binary Mailbox messages under Python3. Since then I have carried on working on this class, along with adding a handler class.
Improved Mailbox Handling
One of the things I wasn’t so keen on with my implementation was the need to specify the type of Mailbox value, i.e. BOOL, NUMBER, or TEXT. Python’s variables have their own type, so the code has been adjusted to use the value’s own type to determine the binary payload format. It is still possible to coerce the type:
from ev3mailbox import EV3Mailbox
float_msg = EV3Mailbox("Pi", 3.1415)
# Coerce to a string
string_msg = EV3Mailbox("Pie", 3.1415, str)
These changes have made the use of this side of the code much cleaner.
Mailbox I/O Handler
Whilst working on my use case for the original code, I had been working on the principle that I’d be using it in a simple synchronous send/receive pattern. This worked well, until I started using threads at both sides of the ev3dev <-> EV3g link. Once threads were in the mix, there’s a risk that the bt_socket.recv(…) call could actually receive a message that wasn’t destined for that particular call, but for another area of the program.
The solution to the above problem was to implement a receiving thread that deals with all the socket.recv(…) calls. Each message is decoded, and then each Mailbox name has its own FIFO of message objects. It’s a deliberate choice to maintain the list of objects, rather than just their values, so that they can be forced to floats if it’s known they may be very small – see my previous post about that problem.
The new class implements a handler that will deal with all the Bluetooth and thread side of things. All that’s then required to do is call send(…), get(…), or stop() on the class instance:
from ev3messages import EV3Messages
handler = EV3Message(bt_mac_address)
handler.send("Name", value)
msg = handler.get("ANOther")
value = msg.value
handler.stop()
The calls to send(…) and get(…) should (!) be thread safe, so calls to get(…) wait on receiving a message of the requested name.
Code Repo
The repo is available from: https://gitlab.com/Jander/ev3-mailbox-python and is released under the GPLv3.