Learn electronics and file handling in Python

29 July 2024

Issue 144 of the MagPi is out now, including my cover feature on getting started with electronics and part two of my Productive Python series.

If you're a Raspberry Pi user who's never dabbled with electronics, I hope my feature will give you the confidence to begin. It shows you how to wire up an LED safely and control it from Python. There is also a shopping list of useful components and a guide to follow-on projects you can find online to build your skills. The program in this article turns your LED into a Morse code transmitter. I've extended it slightly to take your text input and convert it into the flashing Morse code. The photo I've used to illustrate this on my site shows strips of paper with Morse code messages stamped into them. I photographed it at the Porthcurno Museum of Global Communications.

Last issue, part one of Productive Python looked at time travel experiments in Python, showing how to create clocks and calendars to help you manage your time. This issue, I shared two programs I've written to automate frequent tasks. The first Python program searches through PDFs (such as ebooks and magazine back issues). The other is a Python program to download web pages and put them into a Word document. The examples show you how to process files and web content, and how to save the output to text files and Word files. I hope these programs are useful starting points for readers as they think about other routine tasks they could delegate to Python.

If you encounter errors when trying to use pip install in an old tutorial (for example Raspberry Radio or ArtEvolver in my free Coding Compendium ebook), you need to set up a virtual environment. My latest Productive Python tutorial also walks you through the steps involved in doing this using Thonny. It's easy, but it's new, so I recommend you take a look if you haven't done it before.

The MagPi can be ordered or downloaded online and is available in newsagents, including WH Smiths.

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