LED Pulse Network: Part 2

Lately I've been working on the serial communication portion of the pulse network I am making. The details get rather technical, but so far it is going well. I am testing one device at a time before I start wiring devices together. 

In this test, I made my chipKit respond to certain serial messages by turning on its on-board LEDs or pulsing the light through the line of LEDs forwards or backwards. 

I then put together a quick Python script to help automate the testing process. It gives me a command prompt and I can type one of the following commands to send messages to the device:

on - turn the on-board LEDs on

off - turn the on-board LEDs off

pulse forwards - "pulse" through the LEDs in the forwards direction

pulse backwards - "pulse" through the LEDs in the backwards direction

Here is a video: