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Adapted and simplified from Franck Albinet's exercises available here. Also presented by NSRC at APRICOT 2018.

Introduction

While one of the primary purpose of IoT is to collect and exchange data over an inter-connected network, it is as well important to be able to persist information in the IoT device itself: log files of device's activity, Received Signal Strength Activity (RSSI), ...

Learning outcomes

You will learn how to: access and operate device's file system; create and write a file in the flash folder; handle files safely using with statement; generate programmatically time stamped log file names; make your code robust and flexible with try ... except statement.

Required Components

For this example you will need:

  • a LoPy or WiPy module
  • a microUSB cable
  • a development PC

The source code is available here.

Folder structure

The folder tree is the following:

/ (root)

    /flash
        main.py
        boot.py
       /lib
       /cert
       /sys

    /sd (if mounted)

By default, when you sync main.py, boot.py, ... from your atom project, these files are written into the flash folder.

Let's explore and navigate this folder structure interactively. Connect to a Lopy via the Atom console and upload the source code for this exercise.

Import the basic operating system module (os): import os.

Basic File System Operations
import os
# to find you current working directory:
os.getcwd() ## most probably the /flashfolder
# to list folders and files in your current working directory:
os.listdir()
# to create a new folder/directory named "log":
os.mkdir('log'); ...


Take a look at os module documentation for a full list of methods.

Now notice that if you list the files and folders under the root folder: os.listdir('/'),you get only the flash directory. There is no SD card mounted.

Writing

In the simplest case, to create and write a new file:

os.listdir('/flash')

# create/open, write, close a file
f = open('log/my_first_file.log', 'w')
f.write('Testing write operations in a file.')
f.close()

# open, read, close an existing file
f = open('log/my_first_file.log', 'r')
f.readall()
f.close()

For further reference on reading and writing files in Python, look at the official documentation here.

But in essence to handle files in Python, you first need to open a file (even if it does not exist yet) python f = open('log/my_first_file.log', 'w') the open function takes as argument: file name 'log/my_first_file.log' (relative or full path) and mode: read, write, ...

Once open, you get a file object to play with and hence can start writing data in it: 

f.write('Testing write operations in a file.')

Then you need to close the file to free up any system resources taken up by the open file. After calling f.close(), attempts to use the file object will automatically fail.

Pro tip: using the with statement.

It is good practice to use the with keyword when dealing with file objects. This has the advantage that the file is properly closed after its suite finishes, even if an exception is raised on the way. It is also much shorter than writing equivalent try-finally blocks.

For instance to read the file just created, you can use the following syntax:

with open('log/my_first_file.log', 'r') as f:
    f.readall()

This is much cleaner and safer.

Finally, before creating a folder or a file, we would like to test if it exists already. The code below test it and recap. the whole process:{code

main.py under `src/micro-sd/flash` directory:
import os
file_path = '/flash/log'

try:
    os.listdir('/flash/log')
    print('/flash/log file already exists.')
except OSError:
    print('/flash/log file does not exist. Creating it ...')
    os.mkdir('/flash/log')

name = '/my_first_file.log'

# Writing
with open(file_path + name, 'w') as f:
    f.write('Testing write operations in a file.')

# Reading
with open(file_path + name, 'r') as f:
    print(f.readall())

The try ... except statement does the following:

  1. try to list the files and folder under /flash/log folder;
  2. if the folder does not exist an error occurs (it raises an OSError exception) that we intercepts to write our message and create our folder.

"Advanced" code [optional]

When we use log files to monitor a device's activity, we often want to generate programmatically a file name in the following format: /flash/log/acq/yyyymmddhhmmsslist.csv with: yyyy current year; mm current month; * ...

A first simple, explicit and readable approach could be:

import time 

year, month, day, hour, minute, second, ms, dayinyear = time.localtime()

nameCsv = '/flash/log/acq'
nameCsv = nameCsv + '{:04d}'.format(year)
nameCsv = nameCsv + '{:02d}'.format(month)
nameCsv = nameCsv + '{:02d}'.format(day)
nameCsv = nameCsv + '{:02d}'.format(hour)
nameCsv = nameCsv + '{:02d}'.format(minute)
nameCsv = nameCsv + '{:02d}'.format(second)
nameCsv = nameCsv + 'list.csv'

A second approach more succinct would be to take advantage of Python list comprehensions:

base = '/flash/log/acq/'
time_stamp = ''.join(['{:02d}'.format(i) for i in time.localtime()][:6])
name = base + time_stamp + 'list.csv'

Let's unpack this second implementation:

time.localtime()

outputs a tuple (1970, 1, 1, 0, 21, 40, 3, 1) representing year, month, ...

# formatting integer to string with list comprehension
['{:02d}'.format(i) for i in time.localtime()

outputs ['1970', '01', '01', '00', '24', '05', '03', '01']

# We keep only year, month, day, hour, min., sec. by slicing the list:
['{:02d}'.format(i) for i in time.localtime()][:6]



# last we join the list to a single string
''.join(['{:02d}'.format(i) for i in time.localtime()][:6])

outputs: '19700101002920'

We can now simply concatenate this substring with a prefix and suffix and that's done.

As it is a quite frequent operation, we could even encapsulate it in an helper function as below:

def get_log_filename(prefix, suffix):
    time_stamp = ''.join(['{:02d}'.format(i) for i in time.localtime()][:6])
    return prefix + time_stamp + suffix

and use it when required: get_log_filename('/flash/log/acq', 'list.csv')

Exercise

Write a script writing a file named "log.csv" in /flash/log/ folder so that:

  • if the user pushes the button the pressing time and an incremented counter is saved;
  • it the counter reaches 10, LED is switched on.


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