Monster In the Box (MitB)

Monster in the box. Was inspired by the generic pifacedigitialio server, but has been rewritten to take advantage of python built-in threading. Also, the web page refreshes itself if the box is busy.

The MitB has three different shows, which are selected by the user.

Additional Notes

Installing pygame and pifacedigitalio

Rasbian seems to have its own install of pygame called python3-pygame.

sudo apt install python3-pygame

Pifacedigitalio is installed through pip3

pip3 install pifacecommon pifacedigitalio

fixing "cannot find device error" (Issue deprecated in 2023)

Within spi.py (at my system it was at /usr/local/lib/python3.5/dist-packages/pifacecommon/spi.py) add a line speed_hz=ctypes.c_uint32(100000) to the transfer struct so that it looks as following

create the spi transfer struct

    transfer = spi_ioc_transfer(
        tx_buf=ctypes.addressof(wbuffer),
        rx_buf=ctypes.addressof(rbuffer),
        len=ctypes.sizeof(wbuffer),
        speed_hz=ctypes.c_uint32(100000) 
    )

Running the Server

cd MitB
FLASK_APP=MitBServer.py nohup flask run --host=0.0.0.0 &

This will run on port 5000 (default)

Additional libraries (running in a venv)

Python wants to run non-universal libs in a venv. But to get libraries and such you might need to still install pygame as above. If you run in a venv, you may need to add libraries:

libsdl2-mixer-2.0-0 libsdl2-image-2.0-0 libsdl2-2.0-0

these can be retrieved via apt-get