About a year ago, I bought a Projector after I finally admitted that I could actually use a TV in my apartment. I settled on buying a ViewSonic PJD5132. It was a really great value, and has been nothing short of a delight to own.
I was always a bit curious about the DB9 connector on the back of the unit, so I dug into the user manual, and found some hex code strings in there. So, last year, between my last gig at the Sunlight Foundtion and USDS, I spent some time wandering around the US, hitting up DebConf, and exploring Washington DC. Between trips, I set out to figure out exactly what was going on with my Projector, and see if I could make it do anything fun.
So, I started off with basics, and tried to work out how these command codes were structured. I had a few working codes, but to write clean code, I’d be better off understanding why the codes looked like they do. Let’s look at the “Power On” code.
0x06 0x14 0x00 0x04 0x00 0x34 0x11 0x00 0x00 0x5D
Some were 10 bytes, other were 11, and most started with similar looking
things. The first byte was usually a 0x06 or 0x07, followed by two
bytes 0x14 0x00, and either a 0x04 or 0x05. Since the first few bytes
were similarly structured, I assumed the first octet (either 0x06 or 0x07)
was actually a length, since the first 4 octets seemed always present.
So, my best guess is that we have a Length byte at index 0, followed by two bytes for the Protocol, a flag for if you’re Reading or Writing (best guess on that one), and opaque data following that. Sometimes it’s a const of sorts, and sometimes an octet (either little or big endian, confusingly).
Length | Read / Write | | | Protocol | Data | |----| | |------------------------| 0x06 0x14 0x00 0x04 0x00 0x34 0x11 0x00 0x00 0x5D
Right. OK. So, let’s get to work. In the spirit of code is data, data is code, I hacked up some of the projector codes into a s-expression we can use later. The structure of this is boring, but it’ll let us both store the command code to issue, as well as define the handler to read the data back.
(setv *commands*
; function type family control
'((power-on nil nil (0x06 0x14 0x00 0x04 0x00 0x34 0x11 0x00 0x00 0x5D))
(power-off nil nil (0x06 0x14 0x00 0x04 0x00 0x34 0x11 0x01 0x00 0x5E))
(power-status const power (0x07 0x14 0x00 0x05 0x00 0x34 0x00 0x00 0x11 0x00 0x5E))
(reset nil nil (0x06 0x14 0x00 0x04 0x00 0x34 0x11 0x02 0x00 0x5F))
...
As well as defining some of the const responses that come back from the Projector itself. These are pretty boring, but it’s helpful to put a name to the int that falls out.
(setv *consts*
'((power ((on (0x00 0x00 0x01))
(off (0x00 0x00 0x00))))
(freeze ((on (0x00 0x00 0x01))
(off (0x00 0x00 0x00))))
...
After defining a few simple functions to write the byte arrays to the serial port as well as reading and understanding responses from the projector, I could start elaborating on some higher order functions that can talk projector. So the first thing I wrote was to make a function that converts the command entry into a native Hy function.
(defn make-api-function [function type family data]
`(defn ~function [serial]
(import [PJD5132.dsl [interpret-response]]
[PJD5132.serial [read-response/raw]])
(serial.write (bytearray [~@data]))
(interpret-response ~(str type) ~(str family) (read-response/raw serial))))
Fun. Fun! Now, we can invoke it to create a Hy & Python importable API wrapper in a few lines!
(import [PJD5132.commands [*commands*]]
[PJD5132.dsl [make-api-function]])
(list (map (fn [(, function type family command)]
(make-api-function function type family command)) *commands*)))
Cool. So, now we can import things like power-on from *commands* which
takes a single argument (serial) for the serial port, and it’ll send a
command, and return the response. The best part about all this is you only
have to define the data once in a list, and the rest comes for free.
Finally, I do want to be able to turn my projector on and off over the network so I went ahead and make a Flask “API” on top of this. First, let’s define a macro to define Flask routes:
(defmacro defroute [name root &rest methods]
(import os.path)
(defn generate-method [path method status]
`(with-decorator (app.route ~path) (fn []
(import [PJD5132.api [~method ~(if status status method)]])
(try (do (setv ret (~method serial-line))
~(if status `(setv ret (~status serial-line)))
(json.dumps ret))
(except [e ValueError]
(setv response (make-response (.format "Fatal Error: ValueError: {}" (str e))))
(setv response.status-code 500)
response)))))
(setv path (.format "/projector/{}" name))
(setv actions (dict methods))
`(do ~(generate-method path root nil)
~@(list-comp (generate-method (os.path.join path method-path) method root)
[(, method-path method) methods])))
Now, we can define how we want our API to look, so let’s define the power
route, which will expand out into the Flask route code above.
(defroute power
power-status
("on" power-on)
("off" power-off))
And now, let’s play with it!
$ curl http://192.168.1.50/projector/power "off" $ curl http://192.168.1.50/projector/power/on "on" $ curl http://192.168.1.50/projector/power "on"
Or, the volume!
$ curl 192.168.1.50/projector/volume 10 $ curl 192.168.1.50/projector/volume/decrease 9 $ curl 192.168.1.50/projector/volume/decrease 8 $ curl 192.168.1.50/projector/volume/decrease 7 $ curl 192.168.1.50/projector/volume/increase 8 $ curl 192.168.1.50/projector/volume/increase 9 $ curl 192.168.1.50/projector/volume/increase 10
Check out the full source over at github.com/paultag/PJD5132!