@kwilliamm posted:Hey Dave. I'm extremely excited to play with this. What an amazing resource you've provided.
Love the idea of a rest API. A couple unsolicited thoughts (please take with a grain of salt, I know you are under no obligation to share your time any more than you already have)
- I wonder though if integration code like Alexa etc should live outside the package. Just thinking about how to keep it easier to maintain over the long term. There might be many other integrations as well in the future that could leverage the HTTP API.
- Given the thoughtfulness already put into this library, do you imagine a DCS control implementation could also live here? It seems what you are creating here could become THE go to library for Lionel & MTH control.
- Naming: I noticed there are already some pypi packages using pylegacy and pytrain etc. ocontrol? Whatever the case, would be cool for "seo" and marketing purposes if the repo and package name were the same.
P.S. have you seen this bluetooth control python library for lionchief?
As Homer might say, "doh!" I had not checked pypi Until right now, and yes, pytrain is already taken. Kind of makes sense, given all the machine learning interest out there. I will add some kind of suffix that makes sense, at least to me. Although suggestions will be welcome!
one of the reasons I took on packaging is that I wanted to keep the restful API and Alexa integration in a separate project and not have the overhead of it in the main py train. I definitely agree. They should be separate projects and they will be. I'm still debating if I wanna combine the restful API and Alexa into one or even break those out separately. Do you have an opinion on that?
I have no experience with DCS. I'm assuming this is what MTA uses? I think I remember hearing somewhere that MTH was very proprietary and actually went after someone that tried to reverse engineer their protocol. I don't have any of their equipment, nor any of their engines, so at least for the time being, i'm not gonna take that on.
Thanks!
-- Dave
