Kegboard Support Library

In addition to the Kegboard firmware, the Kegboard package comes with some support optional tools (kegboard-monitor and kegboard-tester) as well as a Python library for writing new programs to talk to Kegboard. This section will walk you through installing them.

Note

The support tools are automatically installed as part of Pycore. If you’ve installed Pycore, you can skip this section.

Set up virtualenv

Note

If you’ve already installed Kegbot Server or Pycore in its own virtualenv, you don’t need to create a new one just for Kegbot; it’s perfectly fine to reuse the existing virtualenv.

The virtualenv tool creates a directory where the Kegboard support programs and all of their Python dependencies will be stored. It makes it easier to install the tools without needing root privileges, and reduces the chance of Kegboard clashing with your system’s Python modules.

The first time you set up Kegboard, you will need to create a new virtualenv “home” for it. Any filesystem location is fine. To create it, give the directory name as the only argument. The example below creates the Kegboard virtualenv directory in your user’s home directory:

$ virtualenv ~/kegboard
New python executable in /Users/mike/kegboard/bin/python
Installing setuptools............done.
Installing pip...............done.

Now that the virtualenv home has been created (at ~/kegboard/), there’s one step to remember. Each time you want to use the virtualenv home (to use the support tools) you need to activate it for the current shell:

$ source ~/kegboard/bin/activate
(kegboard) $

Your shell prompt will be updated with (kegboard) when the virtualenv is active. If you want to step out of the env for some reason, just call deactivate:

(kegboard) $ deactivate
$

If you ever want to completely uninstall Kegboard, just delete the entire kegboard/ directory – there’s nothing precious in it, and you can always recreate it by following these steps again.

Tip

You can install multiple versions of Kegboard simply by creating a new virtualenv for each one.

Install Kegboard

There are two approaches to downloading and installing Kegbot:

If in doubt, proceed to the next section for the easiest method. Be sure you have activated your virtualenv first.

From Git (developers)

If you want to run Kegboard from the latest development version, follow this section.

Warning

Running from unreleased git sources is not recommended for production systems, since code can be very unstable and functionality may change suddenly. Always back up your valuable data. As stated in Kegbot’s license, we provide Kegbot with absolutely no warranty.

  1. Check out the Kegboard sources using git:

    (kegboard) $ git clone https://github.com/Kegbot/kegboard.git

  2. Step in to the new tree and run the setup command:

    (kegboard) $ cd kegbot/python
(kegboard) $ ./setup.py develop

The command may take a few minutes as it downloads and installs everything.

Testing a Kegboard

The support library includes two small programs which you can use against a connected Kegboard.

kegboard-monitor.py

This program monitors your system’s serial ports for a Kegboard, displaying information about each one it detects.

kegboard-tester.py

This program cycles through each relay on the Kegboard (when available), opening and closing it.