Tech Talk

I installed python almost immediately after I picked my phone, about six months back. But I forgot all about it! Yesterday, I decided to fix it up for good and start getting my phone do some of my work?

As a first step, I’ve had tremendous success getting python over a bluetooth serial console to work. Of course, sincere thanks to google and other hackers who have tried and tested this method before me. First thing I ever did is to repeat what I did to get my older 6111 to talk to sarge. It is available here. That worked like a piece of cake. I installed a newer python and the python shell using this method.

I tried connecting to python over bluetooth serial console. But I don’t think I ever got it right. So google and I got these links.

http://ramblingfoo.blogspot.com/2007/05/bluetooth-fun-with-my-nokia-6600.html

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/bluez-utils/+bug/227429

Both had the most vital information to get started. Here is what I did.

$ sdptool add --channel=4 SP
$ rfcomm listen 1 4


I used 1 because I tried setting my debian to use 0 at startup. Another “fail” attempt that one.

In another terminal,

$ screen /dev/rfcomm1

It had some wierd characters to start, just press enter and a new interactive python prompt appears. I checked to ensure that it is the one on the phone and not on my machine!

Now to try something useful

…

I came across this python parsing library called pyparsing through my adviser. The first thing I wanted to try implementing on this is a verilog parser. Actually, the site’ pages allows us to request a verilog parser from the author for non-commercial purposes. Anyways, thats not the point. I know and understand some verilog. So it makes more sense for me to try a verilog parser first. I have my parser for structural verilog using this module in my pbwiki page. It cannot handle many cases yet. But I took about an hour to get that code done. I spent about a day or two trying to figure out pyparsing itself. The documentation is fairly good. There are some interesting code snippets and howto in the pyparsing wiki page.

Now I am writing a full fledged verilog parser using this module. I’ve not requested for the author’s script yet. Maybe I’ll do that once I complete to figure out how good I am in using this library. And the full semantic/syntactic specification is available in IEEE explore and in Samir Palnitkar’s book on verilog HDL. I am not sure how much time I can devote to this, so it could be some time before I’ve followed this up. Meanwhile you might want to check the various samples in the pyparsing wiki.

I have been using python for a while now, but I never have to use the XML processing capabilities of this language! Yesterday I tried writing a quick and dirty way to convert an open office worksheet into a simpler XML. Actually not much reason to do this myself. Rama was doing something with worksheets and I decided to give this a shot. And within 15-20 minutes I have a simple XML output parsed out of the huge XML that open office format already is. That is precisely why I love writing python code.

Here is the script. Don’t bother commenting if the python language constructs are ill formed. I learn very slow if my work gets done before I learnt it all!