Ambient Email Notifier (some code)

Will asked about the code I was using in my ambient email notifier. The full code is a bit difficult to figure out because I've got it tied to a system tray icon thingi, which can go in another post another day, but here are some relevant bits.

First, you can get the number of emails with a particular label in gmail with the following Python code:

import feedparser
def msgCount(uid, pwd, filter):
    inbox = feedparser.parse("https://%s:%s@gmail.google.com/gmail/feed/atom%s" % (uid, pwd, filter))
    return len(inbox["entries"])

uid is your gmail address without the @gmail.com bit, filter is "" for the inbox, and "/label/" to get messages tagged with a particular label.

So, after calling msgCount a few times, for different labels, I compute the colour of the RGB LED:

colour = (inbox > 0 and 1 or 0) + (news > 0 and 2 or 0) + (work > 0 and 4 or 0)

This is sent over the serial port to the picaxe which decodes bit 0 for blue, 1 for green and 2 for red.

def triggerAmbient(colour):
    com = serial.Serial("COM3", 2400, timeout=0.25)
    for attempt in range(0,10):
        com.write("%c" % (colour) )
    com.close()

It tries to send a few times in case the picaxe doesn't get it the first time. The code on the picaxe just listens for a byte on the serial input and outputs the lowest 4 bits to the output pins:

main:
 serout 0, n2400, ("Ok")
 serin 3, n2400, b0
 gosub nibble3
 b0 = b0 & 7
 serout 0, n2400, (#b0)
 goto main
 
nibble3:
 if bit2 = 1 then
  high 1
 else
  low 1
 endif
 if bit1 = 1 then
  high 2
 else
  low 2
 endif
 if bit0 = 1 then
  high 4
 else
  low 4
 endif
 return 

This means the python script has control over the colour and you can test that it's working by simply opening up a terminal on COM3 and typing away (A is 01000001 in ASCII, meaning pin 1 is switched on, B is 01000010 so pin 2 is on, etc.)

Update: I've detailed the changes I made to get this working under Linux.