Simulating simple electric circuits

[Bjoern Schliessmann]

Arnaud Delobelle wrote:
> On May 7, 7:05 pm, Bjoern Schliessmann <usenet-

>> There is a master "current controller" object which tells
>> the "source" object to start a "current" by calling its
>> neighbour. The calls traverse the network until they reach a
>> "ground" object. Specifically, the source passes a "telegram"
>> instance with these calls, and everyone it passes through
>> "registers" himself with it (telegrams are duplicated at joints).
>> Then, the ground object calls back to the controller with all
>> received telegrams. Like this I'm already able to get all
>> possible ways through the network.
> 
> Then you can get all 'potential' paths that depend on one or more
> switches being on.  Each path could know what switches it depends
> on and be 'active' if and only if all those switches are on.  And
> each switch would know what paths depend on it. Similarly each
> lightbulb would know what paths it depends on and be 'on' if at
> least one path is active; and each path would know which
> lightbulbs it powers

In principle, I thought so too, but I didn't like the fact that this
involves all possible circuits be determined only once. But it
seems like there is no reasonable, different way.

> When you turn a switch off, it would send a message to the paths
> that depend on it (maybe via the controller?) so that they would
> be deactivated.  In turn the lightbulbs on these paths would be
> informed that they are no longer active.
> 
> When you turn a switch on, it would send a message to the paths
> that depend on it so that those who do not have another off switch
> would be activated.  In turn the lightbulbs on these paths would
> be informed that they have a new power source.

Yep. Looks like I have to do extended "bookkeeping" for this. I was
looking for a more dynamic, general way.

> It seems to me that it would work well with the way you started it
> out, but I may have misunderstood some aspects or overlooked some
> problems ;)

Thanks for your input. The biggest problem I got until now are the
crummy interfaces for interconnection which quickly get inconcise.
I've had a look at the NetworkX tutorial and it seems like this
could simplify the code a bit.

Regards,


Björn

-- 
BOFH excuse #173:

Recursive traversal of loopback mount points