library fixes to get Adafruit OLED Bonnet working

BeauSlim commented 7 years ago

Got an Adafruit OLED Bonnet for my Pi Zero and your UI looks like the best option for getting a simple menu going. Of course you have a major project going on here and this is a minor thing, but I thought I would give you the option of ignoring it since these little OLED boards might end up being popular. Adafruit is selling them in bundles with Zero Ws.

I had to change luma.core.serial to luma.core.interface.serial in output/drivers/luma_driver.py

I needed to change to pull UP in pi_gpio.py to get the built-in 5-way joystick and 2 buttons working. An option in the config.json would be nice. I'd do a pull request, but I'm just getting into Python and I don't think you'd like my patches. :-)

CRImier commented 7 years ago

Hi! This is great, thank you! I've seen the Adafruit OLED Bonnet before, it's a nice little thing, and it's used in projects like Radiomesh, even! pyLCI was originally meant to be an interface for input&output combos like these, so adding support for this pHAT is a priority.

I don't yet have one, so a pull request would be much appreciated. Barring that, I will see what's the problem with luma.core.interface. imports, and add pull-up/down support to pi_gpio driver. I will also think about adding a config.json option =)

BTW, you might want to map these buttons to KEY_PAGEUP and KEY_PAGEDOWN, navigating the menus is just so much faster! I will be changing page up and down keys to KEY_F3 and KEY_F4, but I will let you know when that is upstreamed (likely, along with a driver for the Bonnet =) )

Could you please share your config.json?

CRImier commented 7 years ago

Also, how did you like the documentation you found along the way? Any places you could point to where it's lacking?

BeauSlim commented 7 years ago

Sorry for the delay. Ok, I'm new to pull requests, but I submitted one for the luma.core "interfaces" issue.

I guess I'll do another pull for the gpio pull-up issue so you can see what fixed things for me and then add an option to the json file for it. Or leave that and I'll submit a proper patch at some point in the hopefully not too distant future when I'm more up to speed on Python.

I changed the extra 2 buttons to page up and down. Yes, that is helpful.

My current /boot/zpui_config.json is

{ "input": [ { "driver":"pi_gpio", "kwargs": { "button_pins":[17, 22, 27, 23, 4, 6, 5] } } ], "output": [ { "driver":"ssd1306", "kwargs": { "hw":"i2c", "address":"0x3c" } } ] }

CRImier commented 7 years ago

Yep, page up and down keys are very, very helpful with big menus and small screens! You changed the mapping in the driver file, right? I assume you did, if so, can you share the modifications? I'm going to add an "adafruit_oled_bonnet" input and output drivers, which would just pass-through options to ssd1306 and pi_gpio drivers, so the config would be less verbose - and I'd also like to add the key mapping changes =)

CRImier commented 7 years ago

So, it seems I also need to implement input UI element switching - since you won't be able to use NumpadCharInput, but only CharArrowKeysInput, and, as NumpadCharInput is currently hard-coded everywhere you can input characters (including, for example, WiFi password entry menu), I need to somehow distinguish between different input drivers and serve limited UI elements to the drivers that don't have additional buttons necessary. For that, I finally need to implement input driver capabilities =) Will open an issue here, or, if I'll have enough time, I'll implement it right away.

BeauSlim commented 6 years ago

Yes, I changed the default_mapping to this:

default_mapping = [ "KEY_UP", "KEY_DOWN", "KEY_LEFT", "KEY_RIGHT", "KEY_KPENTER", "KEY_PAGEUP", "KEY_PAGEDOWN", "KEY_DELETE"]

to match the button order in the .json file above. There is no button that corresponds to the KEY_DELETE entry. Not sure if that is significant/important.

Yes, the joystick-and-2-buttons situation definitely makes text input difficult in general. My primary goal is to get a set of authentication tools to work, including a password manager based on hardpass, OATH OTP, and maybe Fido U2F, so I definitely need a way to input a decently complex password easily. I am playing with putting together an on-screen virtual keyboard.

Before I found ZPUI, I was playing with Adafruit's Retrogame to handle the gpio inputs. It maps gpio buttons to virtual USB keyboard inputs via evdev. It has the side-effect of typing on the console if it isn't hooked, but that can be a good thing. It might be useful if you are looking to move toward a more flexible input framework, funnelling everything through the standard linux user input handling. Retrogame also has some limited "chording" ability and pressing 2 buttons together can send a different character as input.

Totally unrelated: I don't know if you've run into Nerd Fonts before, but they let you display a huge number of glyphs and work great in your menus. You might try the ProFont version, which is a clone of the original (i.e. 1984) Macintosh Monaco font, and the smaller point sizes are proper pixel fonts. I think it looks really great on these small OLED screens. The 2 Ubuntu variations (monospace and proportional) work well, too.