Program in the sketch side vs program in the linino side...

[mediamad]

Seems a bit "brute force" for today's world but If I can't get the serial tunnel going I'll give that a shot.  Thanks for the suggestion.

[Roque Campos]

You can use the bridge library to access the digital and analog pins through rest calls, as you can see in the this tutorial:

http://arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/Bridge

I suppose you can do rest calls in phyton.

[mediamad]

Yeah, I'm aware of that but I would have to constantly poll every input and fast enough to not miss a momentary closure... doesn't seem very reliable.