Announcing python-ev3dev v0.8.0

We just released python-ev3dev v0.8.0, which includes a bunch of miscellaneous bug fixes and some new goodies to try out.

Firstly, we have added a new “ev3dev.fonts” module which allows you to easily load a wide range of preexisting fonts by name. To draw text on the EV3 screen, for example, you could do this:

import ev3dev.fonts as fonts
screen.draw.text((10,10), 'Hello World!', font=fonts.load('luBS14'))

We also changed the way that sensor-specific properties are accessed. Instead of these “special” properties being accessible as methods, they are now Python properties. This change means that instead of calling my_sensor.angle(), you would access my_sensor.angle (without the parenthesis). These changes apply to properties such as TouchSensor.is_pressed and GyroSensor.angle.

You can now ask to wait for a motor to change state, e.g. wait for a motor to stop running (motor.wait_while('running')). This comes with the caveat that waiting for the “stalled” state has issues on current kernel versions.

Finally, the LED helper functions have been updated with new logic to make them operate much more reliably when using triggers. This should now work without issue:

Leds.set(Leds.LEFT, brightness_pct=0.5, trigger='timer', delay_off=3000, delay_on=500)

The full release notes are here: https://github.com/rhempel/ev3dev-lang-python/releases/tag/0.8.0.

To upgrade to this new version, run the following commands (make sure that you have connected your EV3 to the internet):

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install --only-upgrade python3-ev3dev