emulating Lunatone's IoT protocol

[jktjkt]

I wrote a small emulator which enables Lunatone's Windows GUI, the DALI Cockpit SW, to talk to an app which uses python-dali. As was suggested in #139, let's move this into upstream's git. Also, my goal is to make this usable from my application, so putting stuff into examples/ (which is not packaged by default) wouldn't help me much. Let's stick this right below dali/ unless there's some better place.

My USB-to-DALI interface is connected to a tiny headless Pi Zero, which is running some Python code (built on top of python-dali) for stuff like circadian color temperature control, automatic blinds, automatic light based on movement, etc. This all works well, but every now and then I have a need to run Lunatone's DALI Cockpit to perform some changes in my devices' configuration.

That's a Windows application, so I would usually fire up a VM with Windows and the DALI Cockpit, stop my automation, and then use usb-ip to export the USB device over network from my embedded server, e.g.:

ssh root@private.example.org systemctl restart usbip-bind@17b5\:0020.service

...then import that at my desktop, e.g.:

usbip attach -r private.example.org -b $(usbip list -p -r private.example.org | grep 17b5:0020 | cut '-d:' -f1 | awk '{print $1}')

...and finally attach that to the VM:

echo "<hostdev mode='subsystem' type='usb' managed='yes'><source><vendor id='0x17b5'/><product id='0x0020'/></source><address type='usb' bus='0' port='3'/></hostdev>" | virsh attach-device win10 /dev/stdin

That works, but it's a pain, and the automatic lights at the WC won't react to movement, and it's not great if it's dark in there.

So I got fed up and wrote this tiny emulator of the Lunatone DALI-2 IoT Gateway. The idea is that you can run this on the Linux machine which has the USB-to-DALI interface already connected, and you can let your Windows VM connect to that over IP, using the device's emulated Websocket entry point. It's possible to run this either as a standalone application, or you can simply put it into your application code.

[sde1000]

I'm happy to take this, but I think it should be in /examples/ and not /dali/.

I've pushed an update to the CI configuration that removes Python 3.7 and adds Python 3.12 — maybe move the file and rebase on that so the tests don't fail?

[jktjkt]

I'm happy to take this, but I think it should be in /examples/ and not /dali/.

I tend to agree, but then files below examples/ are not packaged, and therefore I cannot take the code as-is and simply import than module into my application. What I'd like to prevent is having one copy in python-dali's examples/ and another copy of the same file in my repo, if possible.

Is there a solution to that? If not, I'll respin this patch targeting examples/ as you wish.