Raspberry Pi Forums

Green to Python but an old fossil to computing, I looking for a call/create method for one created static child process per motor for a robotics project.

Here is list of motors and parameters Motor #, device addr, bank, type, pin assignments. For the FiveWire the relative pin order is for IN1~4 For the A4988 and Easy Stepper, the relative signal names are: Enable,MS1,MS2,MS3,Reset,Sleep,Step,Direction use -1 if a pin is not used (i.e. strapped to a hard value with a wire)
The first value in the tuple in the list is the motor number, the second is the chip address for a 23017, the third is GPIOA or GPIOB on the chip, and the following digits are the mapping bits for the controller signals.

During initialization, I wish to create processes addressable by motor number and address/pipe/map/what-have-you commands and results to/from each child process. I would prefer each process to only receive motor data intended for it, but could tolerate a "that is not for me, ignore" sub-process handling. In the spirit of open computing, I will publish the full results. I had to generalize my setup due to a mix of motor types, chip configuration, etc. As you may be able to tell, I did this to easily define other types of control structures (if there really are any) and devices that can be made to communicate through the 23017 chip.

'Processes' sort of 'smells' like threads (https://docs.python.org/2/library/threading.html) and the rest is kind of screaming for classes (https://docs.python.org/2/tutorial/classes.html). To keep all the classes and threads in control look at creating a dictionary of motor objects (based on a motor class) with the numbers as keys.

Thank you very much! A prod in the right direction is what I was looking for. I had things working with a pile of spagetti code and discrete variables, but maintaining it due to minor changes was looking to be a nightmare. For this section of the project, I hope my efforts help someone down the road who "just wants to make a bunch of motors go"