scratchpy

A Python client for Scratch

Getting Started

1. Start up Scratch

2. Enable remote sensor connections, or "Host Mesh" in BYOB

3. Create a variable for all sprites named foo

>>> import scratch
>>> s = scratch.Scratch()
>>> s.broadcast("Hello, Scratch!")
>>> s.receive()
('sensor-update', {'foo': 0})
>>> 

Installation

# pip install scratchpy

Or

# easy_install scratchpy

If you're installing from source, you can untar the source tarball, cd into the project directory and run

# make install

Usage

Connecting

Constructing a new Scratch object will automatically connect to Scratch

import scratch
s = scratch.Scratch()

This will create a connection on localhost port 42001 and set s.connected to True. If you want to change the host or port, you can provide them to the constructor

s = scratch.Scratch(host='0.0.0.0', port=40000) 

If you are disconnected, you can reconnect using the connect method

s.connect()

Broadcasting

Broadcasting messages to Scratch will function like a broadcast block in Scratch. You can broadcast either a single message

s.broadcast('Hello, Scratch!')

Or a list of messages

s.broadcast(['Hello, Scratch!', 'How are you doing?'])

Actually, you can give broadcast any iterable object (list, tuple, set, generator, etc.).

Sensor updates

Sending sensor updates to Scratch will create new sensors in the Sensing category, or update sensors with new values. The sensorupdate method accepts a dict whose keys are sensor names, and values are sensor values.

s.sensorupdate({'temperature' : 75})

Receiving

Use the receive method to receive messages from Scratch

msg = s.receive()

A call to receive will block until it reads a message from Scratch. If the call is successful, it returns a tuple of the message received. If the call failed, it raises an exception. If the message received is not a proper Scratch message, receive returns None.

The first element of the tuple will be the message type and the second element will be the message data.

Two types of messages can be received: broadcast messages and sensor update messages.

Broadcasts

Broadcast messages are received anytime a broadcast block is executed in Scratch. The message data is a string of the message that was broadcast. An example broadcast message returned from receive looks like this:

('broadcast', 'Hello, Python!')

Sensor updates

Sensor updates are received when global variables (i.e. variables created for all sprites) are created, or when their value changes. The message data is a dict that maps global variable names to their values. Suppose you created two variables, foo and bar. Upon their creation, receive would return a message that looks like this:

('sensor-update', {'foo': 0, 'bar': 0})

Handling Multiple Messages

receive returns only one message. If Scratch has sent more than one message, they will stay on the network buffer until receive is called again. To receive all the messages from Scratch you must repeatedly call receive. A nice way to handle this is to have a generator function that yields a message everytime it receives, and exits on error.

def listen():
    while True:
        try:
           yield s.receive()
        except scratch.ScratchError:
           raise StopIteration

Now you can iterate over all the messages from Scratch

for msg in listen():
    if msg[0] == 'broadcast':
        # code to handle broadcasts
    elif msg[0] == 'sensor-update':
        # code to handle sensor updates

If an error occurs or the connection to Scratch is closed, Python simply exits the loop.

Disconnecting

To close a connection to Scratch

s.disconnect()

A disconnection may occur without an explicit call to disconnect. These usually happen when either Scratch is closed, remote sensor connections are disabled, or when there is something up with the network.

Errors

There are two kinds of errors that can be caught in connect, receive, broadcast, and sensorupdate:

ScratchError is raised when there are errors with the network (e.g. connection refused, connection established, etc. basically any error from errno). The error message returned is the error message from errno.

ScratchConnectionError is raised when reading or writing data has no effect (i.e. reading from Scratch returns an empty string, or writing to Scratch writes 0 bytes). This is usually a sign that Scratch has been disconnected.

If you do not care about the difference, you can just except ScratchError and it will also catch ScratchConnectionError.

License

MIT