Python serial data aquisition

[Paul Rubin]

fccoelho at gmail.com (Flavio codeco coelho) writes:
> I'll put your Ideas to the test ASAP, meanwhile, could you point me to
> references to these bit operations in Python? I am new to this stuff,
> and might need to do more of this to support other hardware...
> 
> I havent been able to find anything about this on the python
> documentation..

ord(ch) turns a character into an integer, i.e. ord('a') = 97, etc.

You can use the << (left shift), >> (right shift), | (logical or),
and & (logical and) operations just like in C.

So for your diagram

             |-------------bits(1-8)-----------|
    Byte1: x  x   x   n1 n2 n3   n4   n5
    Byte2: x  n6 n7 n8 n9 n10 n11 n12

assuming n1 is the high order bit, you'd just say 

   value = ((ord(byte1) & 0x1f) << 7) | (ord(byte2) & 0x3f)

or something like that.