LED Driven Development

Practise TDD as if it was Christmas!

Prototype soldered at the London Hackerspace.

Demo at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMeQe-jHdWg

How does it works?

There are two components and one protocol to communicate between them.

The "protocol"

The commands are one byte long and change the state of the arduino. There are only three different commands:

*  'A' meaning passing test (turn one LED on)
*  'B' meaning failing test (turn another LED on)
*  'C' for running test (blink the two LEDs)
*  any other byte are ignored

Arduino side

The arduino runs the LedServer.pde code to control the LEDs and listen on the serial interface for the commands

Computer side

From the computer it becomes really trivial to control the arduino as this python example demonstrate:

>> import serial
>> s = Serial(port='/dev/ttyACM0')
>> s.open()
>> s.write("C")
>> s.write("A")
>> s.close()

It's becoming much more interesting when it's showing interesting stuff, like status of unit tests! For this it uses a forked version of gorun.py, https://github.com/Gautier/python-gorun, which sends a "C" while commands are running, "A" when they return 0, and "B" otherwise.

Note: gorun.py is a tool to run commands when files change, in our case it runs nosetests when files in this directory are saved. Making example_test.py tests pass is left as an exercise for the reader.

Contents

.
|-- LedServer
|   `-- LedServer.pde # Arduino code
|
|-- example_test.py # some code with a failing to play
|
|-- gorun_settings.py # example settings with the LDD_PORT setting
|
|-- requirements.txt # python dependencies 
|
|-- README.md # this file

TODO

1. Build a version with a blue and red LEDs
2. Add noise