Maybe you can use built-in functions:
>>> myString = "hello"
>>> ba = bytearray(myString)
>>> ba[0]
104
>>> bin(ba[0])
'0b1101000'
Split the 0b:
>>> bin(ba[0]).split('b')[1]
'1101000'
or
>>> bin(ba[0])[2:]
'1101000'
I'll hope you can solve your problem with the snippets! :)