Error initialising sevensegment

[twdkeule]

When using the sevensegment class a TypeError occurs:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "8_digit.py", line 21, in
seg = sevensegment(device)
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.4/dist-packages/luma/led_matrix/device.py", line 123, in init
self.text = ""
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.4/dist-packages/luma/led_matrix/device.py", line 131, in text
self._text_buffer = observable(bytearray(value), observer=self.flush)
TypeError: string argument without an encoding

According to the Python3 documentation, the encoding needs to be added

If it is a string, you must also give the encoding (and optionally, errors) parameters; bytearray() then converts the string to bytes using str.encode().

[twdkeule]

I tried to fix it locally by editing device.py and adding the encoding 'utf-8' on line 131, but I ran into another error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "8_digit.py", line 21, in
seg = sevensegment(device)
File "/home/pi/scripts/device.py", line 123, in init
self.text = ""
File "/home/pi/scripts/device.py", line 132, in text
self.flush(self._text_buffer)
File "/home/pi/scripts/device.py", line 135, in flush
data = bytearray(self.segment_mapper(buf, notfound=self.undefined)).ljust(int(self._bufsize), '\0')
TypeError: an integer is required

Fyi, the code I am trying to run is

from sys import argv
from time import sleep
from luma.core.serial import spi
from luma.core.render import canvas
from device import max7219, sevensegment

if __name__ == "__main__":
	cascade = 1
	serial = spi(port=0, device=0)
	device = max7219(serial, cascaded=cascade)
	seg = sevensegment(device)
	# Do stuff with seg ...

[rm-hull]

So as you've discovered, this is "hot off the forge", and clearly needs some tests writing to smoke these issues out.

I tried it on python2, but there some UTF-8 encoding differences with python3, and it has highlighted a bug in the code in the segment mapper: I just pushed a code fix into the repo, but wont do a release just yet - if you sync across the changes and let me know if that lets you get further.

p.s. If you've only got one device, you can skip the cascaded= flag and it should default

[twdkeule]

Thanks for the fast response.
I don't mean to be ungrateful, but you made a typo and added too many .decode()'s, so I made a pull request #59

[rm-hull]

No - many thanks for the PR - merged it

[rm-hull]

Although ... the tests around that now seem to fail - have a look here: https://travis-ci.org/rm-hull/luma.led_matrix/jobs/193409843

The test suite can be run if you install tox - and then run

$ tox 

or

$ tox -e py27

I tend to run the tests on a linux desktop machine, as its a lot faster than on a RPi

[rm-hull]

I've pushed a fix - master is now green - without the decode on the bytearray, it returns the ordinals rather than the ascii characters