Morse Code

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Codes

How can we encode information to communicate it?

Long before the Internet it was possible to communicate digitally across long distances! This was done using electrical telegraph systems.

Samuel Morse (a painter! -- and inventor), together with Joseph Henry (the scientist who invented the precursor of the electric doorbell, and the namesake for the unit of electrical inductance, H) and Alfred Vail (a machinist and inventor), contributed to the development of a telegraph system that uses two kinds of marks: "dots" (represented by short lines on paper) and "dashes" (longer lines).

Each character (letter or number) is represented by a sequence of dots and dashes. Frequent characters use few marks (the "e" uses a single dot, the "t" uses a single dash), less frequent characters use more marks.

Ultimately, the Morse code was standardized by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).

Morse Code

The following table shows the letters and numbers in ITU Morse code:

Morse Code

Complete the character_to_marks dictionary to store the mapping from character to Morse code. The keys are single-character strings containing the characters. The values are lists of Booleans, where False represents a dot, and True represents a dash.

Measurements

The measurements are all multiples of some unit.

Dot: 1 unit
Dash: 3 units
Space between marks: 1 unit
Space between characters: 3 units
Space between words: 7 units

In our implementation, methods have a parameter to specify the size of a unit.

Complete the functions below to produce a dash, a dot, a space between marks, a space between letters, and a space between words.

Use the hgap function to produce a gap of a desired width.

Complete the mark function, so it calls dot or dash depending on the Boolean parameter.

Encode

Now let's encode some text into Morse code!

A single character

Implement the character_to_graphic function so it produces a graphic of the Morse code for any given character. Use the characters_to_marks dictionary, and call mark and mark_gap.

A single word

Implement the word_to_graphic function so it produces a graphic of the Morse code for the given word. Use character_to_graphic and character_gap.

Multiple words

Implement the text_to_graphic function so it produces a graphic of the Morse code for a text consisting of zero or more words. Use word_to_graphic and word_gap. Call text.split() to split the text into a list of words.

This activity has been created by LuCE Research Lab and is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Morse Code

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PyTamaro is a project created by the Lugano Computing Education Research Lab at the Software Institute of USI