Python software project for folding@home remote client

After a long time of not programming and just configuring software – and working as a manager in a heavily growing company – I started a new python software project for the folding@home project.

I was inspired first by the folding@home project itself. This project supports heavily finding new vaccines and other drugs while calculating protein folding activities. These computations are also related to the COVID-19 desease.

So please join and contribute the idle time of your computer(s)@home to the project!

Methods learned

The methods I learned so far are quite a lot:

• Python programming itself, including object oriented programming (I’m sure there are still plenty of things I don’t know)
• Kivy, a library for a GUI, based on python, where you are able to produce applications for different mobile operating systems
• Working with threads in python for regulary polling the clients
• Virtual environments for python
• Working with GIT for the first time as a version management system, and using github as a cloud version
• Implementing a telnet client to connect to multiple processing folding@home clients (the API is sometimes a bit weird)

The idea is to compile an app that can be used on any mobile device to control folding@home clients in your local network – or also from outside your network as long as you have access to the folding@home clients via an IP V4 address.

For the time being you always have to have a folding@home client running at your local machine to control other clients. With my app you can control the clients also just with any mobile device.

I have some long ago experience with C++ and Java, but honestly working with python is much easier and makes much more fun!

Contribute

If you want to contribute to the project, just let me know. I will publish the source code soon on github.

The first prototyp with some GUI and some telnet commands is already running 🙂