Programming and technology blog

While working on my personal project Darth-Vader-RPi , I used the Python package pynput for monitoring the keyboard as to simulate push buttons on a Raspberry Pi. However, some keyboard keys were not detected on macOS without running the script with sudo (after adding PYTHONPATH to etc/sudoers ).  The keyboard keys that didn't need sudo were the following: alt keys cmd keys ctrl keys media buttons for play, pause, volume up/down/mute shift keys The other keyboard keys (all the alphanumeric and some special keys such as backspace and right) required the Python script to run with sudo . The pynput documentation explains the modifications you should apply to your application if you want to make it run on Linux, macOS, or Windows. Image credit:   "Apple Key"  by  Antijingoist  is licensed under  CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

SimulRPi is a Python library that I wrote as part of my Darth-Vader-RPi  project. It partly fakes RPi.GPIO and simulates some I/O devices connected to a Raspberry Pi (RPi): push buttons by listening to pressed keyboard keys and LEDs by displaying blinking red dots in the terminal along with their GPIO pin numbers. The Python package pynput is used to monitor the keyboard for any pressed key. Thus, the SimulRPi library can be useful in the case that you want to try your  RPi.GPIO -based script by running it on your computer when no RPi is available at the moment. Example: terminal output Simulating LEDs on an RPi via a terminal Each dot represents a blinking LED connected to an RPi and the number between brackets is the associated GPIO channel number. Here the LED on channel 22 toggles between on and off when a key is pressed. Dependencies Platforms:  Linux, macOS Python:  3.5, 3.6, 3.7, 3.8  pynput >=1.6.8: for monitoring the keyboard for any pressed key...