It’s an alarm clock application for S60 phones (more specifically Nokia 5800) written in Python

The code is NOWHERE near what you’d expect of released code to be – this is NOT a release, rather a preview

This is my first piece of code written in S60 Python. The code is not pretty, not well designed, not nothing – it’s just a proof of concept; helping me get to know the S60 python modules, and wake up on time.

The main feature of this program, that I could not find a ready-made S60 application that already accomplishes this, is the use of a random tune for every alarm.
Don’t you hate it when you choose a song for an alarm clock, and find yourself hating the song ever after? Spazzing just a little bit every time you hear it?
By choosing a random song every morning, you get to hear many of your favorite songs, without slowly developing hate towards them.

The second feature, is “fade in”. The song is initially played in low volume, which is gradually turned up.

Don’t rely on this code to wake you up for important meetings, it is probably full of bugs. It can’t save your last alarm properly (even though it tries to), but it will save your songs path.
It is also semi-automatic, meaning you’ll have to set the alarm every night, it won’t do so automatically (yet!).
It won’t survive phone shutdown either.
It seems like python can’t overcome these obstacles easily, but I’ll try to improve it in the future. If I tried to code it with the bare Symbian API, it wouldn’t have reached the somewhat functional state it is in today…

I only post it here because I have started using it almost daily, and that both lowered my motivation to work for a more complete solution, and urged me to post the code somewhere, as other people may find it useful.
It can also serve as a demo for S60 Python API use.

I have only tested it on Nokia 5800 which is S60 5th edition, with python 1.9.4.
Other configurations may cause nuclear fusion.

Feel free to do whatever you want with the code.

The Code

As a side note, during development I have used pys60-compat which is a wxPython based implementation of portions of the S60 python framework – meaning it let’s you run python code written for s60 in a testing environment on your desktop.
It is somewhat outdated, and I have added some extensions of my own, which I may release in the future.

So, hmm, basically, I’m not really that much of a writer. I think I just started this blog because it happens to me quite often that when I search stuff on google, I find useful information on personal blogs, of all places. Solutions to coding problems (yes, I’m a coder) , interesting reviews and recommendations, and articles.

I thought that I should give back to the web, publish more code that I write, and help others with problems that I have solved. The hosting plan and domain were purchased about 2 months ago, and only now I write my first post, well, I’m a busy man XD

There’s more to come next. I don’t want to put too much effort to the first posts, as there’s a high chance that I will abandon this blog quickly, and no one will ever read them.

Anyway, I’ll post something small and quick that I had coded some days ago in 10 minutes.

Some weeks ago I’ve been contacted by an online buddy to whom I didn’t speak in 2 or 3 years. It was a period during which I was highly enthusiastic about 3d and animation, and he was one of the experts in the forum where I used to “hang” . The short conversation with him inspired me to do some 3d modeling, and I came up with something (quite lame) for a quick modeling challenge in some forum.

So, I had a time limit, and I wanted to keep measure of time as I was modeling. The right thing to do was certainly to program a stopwatch in python using pygame ! I’ll just post the code now, and will look for a code highlighting plug-in for wordpress later.

import pygame,pygame.font
from pygame.locals import *
 
#yuck, global vars ^_^
font=None
surface=None
time=[0,0,0] # an array to keep the current time measurement which is being rendered
start_state=[0,0,0] #the time measurement from which to start counting
start_tick=0 # the number of ticks when we began counting
on=False #wheter the stopwatch should be running or not
 
def main():
    global font,surface,on
 
    video_flags = DOUBLEBUF
    pygame.init() #initialize pygame
    surface = pygame.display.set_mode((200,100), video_flags) #create our main window SDL surface
    surface.fill((255,255,255)) #fill with white
 
    font = pygame.font.Font('INK2SCRI.TTF',60) #load up a ttf font
    last_tick = pygame.time.get_ticks()	# initialize the tick count
 
    while 1: #do forever
        event = pygame.event.poll()
        if event.type == QUIT:
            break
        if event.type == KEYUP and event.key==32: # if the space bar was pushed
            if(on): # if currently running
                #prepare start_state for future use, save current time
                start_state[2] = time[2]
                start_state[1] = time[1]
                start_state[0] = time[0]
            else:
                #starting the timer, so set the tick count reference to the current tick count
                start_tick = pygame.time.get_ticks()
 
            on = not on #toggle on
 
        if(on):
            a = (pygame.time.get_ticks() - start_tick) # get the amount of ticks(miliseconds) that passed from when the stopwatch was last run
 
            time[2] = start_state[2]+ (a / 1000) % 60 #seconds
            time[1] = start_state[1]+((a / 1000) / 60 % 60) #minutes
            time[0] = start_state[0]+(a / 1000) / 3600 #hours
 
        draw()
 
        pygame.display.flip()
 
def draw():
    global surface,font
 
#render the time, by converting each array member to a string, and concating with ':' in between time components. render in black on a white background.
    tempsurface=font.render(str(time[0])+':'+str(time[1])+':'+str(time[2]),1,(0,0,0),(255,255,255))
 
    surface.fill((255,255,255)) #fill the screen with white, to erase the previous time
    surface.blit(tempsurface,(10,10)) # blit the temporary surface to the screen
 
if(__name__=='__main__'):
    main()

Check out the screenshot:

And here’s the model that I used it for:

I’m happy to finally start this blog, hope I will manage to keep writing, and that people will actually read it some time in the future.

Ben.