Taking Stock of Rube Goldberg Branches

Doing a quick review of the Rube Goldberg branches in git:

• Master - Needs pylint fixing
• file-plugin - work complete.  Deleted
• gpio-impl - work complete.  Deleted 
• http-plug - work still to do.  Merge conflicts from master.  Added Trello item
• pip-packaging -- work still to do in order to figure out how to use from pip install only. Merged master.  Added Trello
• scratch-plug - work complete. Deleted. Trello for sorting out tests

Working on the Minecraft-Scratch Interface for the Rube Goldberg Machine

For the Rube Goldberg project at the CoderDojo I need a way to interact with Scratch from Python.  Here's my steps of how I went about it:

1. After reading around I realised that I'd have to run Scratch 1.4 and the Python interaction would come from scratchpy - https://github.com/pilliq/scratchpy
2. Installed scratch 1.4 on Windows
3. pip install scratchpy
4. Enabled Scratch remote sensing - http://wiki.scratch.mit.edu/wiki/Remote_Sensor_Connections#Enabling
5. Played with the interaction - http://youtu.be/YG99uam8pKA
6. Create new branch for scratch plugin git checkout -b scratch-plug
7. Check all tests pas
8. python setup.py test
9. Tests failed as wasn't on Rasp PI.  After some poking around I discovered that I'd installed the GPIO package on to my development virtual box environment, and so now the package was loading okay and the case that I had set up in the test file to spot the lack of GPIO wasn't working.  I deleted out the GPIO package and it all worked again...phew!
10. Making the scratch target -- use a broadcast of either "BLOCK-PRESENT" or "BLOCK-ABSENT"
11. Create a scratchplug.py module
12. Implemented the target code
13. Tested that it worked using a file source
14. Not quite sure how to make the unit tests work.  Will park that problem for now and come back to it later
15. Now to make the source method
16. The problem is that the scratch.receive() method blocks until it receives a broadcast, but the Rube Goldberg architecture needs to poll
17. The solution will be to use the multiprocessing module as shown in this answer on Stack Overflow - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/492519/timeout-on-a-python-function-call
18. Got a bit stuck coordinating the output with Queues since I didn't realise that multiprocessing had its own implementation of Queue -- you live and learn
19. Committed that on to the scratch-plug and pushed to GitHub
20. Made a quick demo of the Minecraft light going into scratch and scratch button turning on a light in Minecraft - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpD-RegWybA