USB controlled mini lava lamps

Step 8 Code

The lava lamps will be controlled by system calls to the "setled" program that will turn on and off the capslock and scroll lock LEDs. Test it out by running the following from a command line (possible as root, depending on your configuration) to make your lamps blink:

setleds -L -caps +scroll < /dev/tty0 ;sleep 3s ;setleds -L +caps -scroll < /dev/tty0; sleep 3; setleds -L </dev/tty0

breaking this down:

#To turn on the red lamp:
setleds -L -caps +scroll < /dev/tty0
#to turn on the green lamp:
setleds -L +caps -scroll < /dev/tty0
#to return to the state where the LEDs display the keyboard settings
setleds -L </dev/tty0

You can include these system calls in your own program, or use the a phython unit test module that Chris wrote based on the PyUnit unit testing framework built into python. Just unpack the files from the tar archive (tar -xzvf lava_unittest.tar.gz from a console) and try the following commands from a console:

python lava_unittest.py test_lava_unittest-pass
python lava_unittest.py test_lava_unittest-fail

or

python test_lava_unittest-pass.py
python test_lava_unittest-fail.py

To run from a terminal emulators, uncomment the warning-flagged lines and try running it
as root from a terminal emulator.

With this code, all one needs to do is swap instances of "unittest" with "lava_unittest" in Python scripts written for unit testing. No re-coding is necessary.