I lost round one with my finch robot, trying to control it by sending raw USB messages from Python (so I can write a Turtle Art module for it). I just ran out of gas and put it away a while.
Sometimes in the open source world, just waiting a bit is the best strategy, and sure enough, when I checked back there was a new C library, courtesy of Steve Strom at Penn State Behrend. This has proven to be a lot easier to access from Python than the original C++ library (based on my very minimal understanding of such things) and it appears I have it working now after an hour or so of fiddling with Python ctypes.
So now I can leave behind tedious USB hacking and get onto the more interesting Turtle Art hacking. I'm trying to get something together for Vivian's birthday, so that gives me nine days.
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