Introduction

What is Automate?

Automate is a general purpose automatization library for Python. Its objective is to offer convenient and robust object-oriented programming framework for complex state machine systems. Automate can be used to design complex automation systems, yet it is easy to learn and fun to use. It was originally developed with home robotics/automatization projects in mind, but is quite general in nature and one could find applications from various fields that could take advantage of Automate. Automate can be embedded in other Python software as a component, which runs its operations in its own threads.

Highlights

“Hello World” in Automate

Let us consider following short Automate program as a first example:

from automate import *

class MySystem(System):
    # HW swtich connected Raspberry Pi GPIO port 1
    hardware_switch = RpioSensor(port=1)
    # Switch that is controllable, for example, from WEB interface
    web_switch = UserBoolSensor()
    # Lamp relay that switches lamp on/off, connected to GPIO port 2
    lamp = RpioActuator(port=2)
    # Program that controls the system behaviour
    program = Program(
        active_condition=Or('web_switch', 'hardware_switch'),
        on_activate=SetStatus('lamp', True)
    )


my_system = MySystem(
    services=[WebService()]
)

This simple example has two sensors hardware_switch, web_switch, actuator (lamp) and a program that contains logic what to do and when. Here, lamp is switched on if either web_switch or hardware_switch has status True. WebService with default settings is enabled so that user can monitor system and set status of web_switch. The following figure (generated via WebService interface) illustrates the system in UML graph:

_images/hello_world.svg

Original application

Automate was originally developed in order to enable simple and robust way of programming home automatization with Raspberry Pi minicomputer, to obtain automatization and automatic monitoring of rather complex planted aquarium safety/controlling system.