I bought an apple IIe for nostalgia and one of the first things I did was hook up a null modem cable to the serial card and make it a linux terminal. I was able to use google via elinks. My kids love the various games like ultima because it's like minecraft (blocky) but you can't build in it.
Integrating a VT220 into my life
61–70 of 125 posts
Re: Integrating a VT220 into my life
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn't the very slow refresh rate of eInk be an issue here?
I actually found a video of a Kindle being used as a terminal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymei7UwBgX4 Looks like it's running a pretend-terminal website which probably explains the latency (the Kindle does not have a fast processor). Way on the other end - here's a Dasung 13.3" eInk monitor (i.e. you feed it DVI and it handles all the display driving for you). It can be yours for a cool $1000. I'll pass, but it'…
I want one of those monitors so bad. Why does it have to be $1000?! Anyone willing to contribute to my Indiegogo campaign? ;)
Re: Integrating a VT220 into my life
#63I can't help but think about waste of power and radiation of CRT. Green movement poisoned us for life.
Re: Integrating a VT220 into my life
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's pretty cool! It reminds me of a similar project I did called z80e, which is an emulator for TI calculators [0]. It uses unicode braille to "render" the screen onto a terminal. Doesn't work on the VT220, though, for obvious reasons. [0] https://github.com/KnightOS/z80e
Fascinating! I'm reading the source code of z80e (tui.c). Your idea of using unicode to display pixels is very interesting. I imagine a fallback mode for libsixel for terminals not sixel-compatible (or the opposite). I try ton compile but it fails (first because scas was missing and now I have an "a2x: not found" in scas). I appreciate a lot the "multitarget rendering" (emscripten, tui, sdl...).
a2x should be provided by the asciidoc package on your distribution. It's used to compile man pages.
I'd merge a pull request adding libsexl support!
Re: Integrating a VT220 into my life
#65Whats in the vial?
Uranium ore samples.
Re: Integrating a VT220 into my life
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd really love to have one or five of those for maintenance work. There's a lot of devices that I don't really need to have a keyboard and video connected to for 99.99% of their life time, but I still need an LC display and KVM switch connected to for about 10 minutes per decade. It's such a waste.
Euhh, I'm not sure I understand your use-case, but e-ink displays aren't especially "cheap", or such. They take a noticeable amount of time to update the display, so doing things like typing, or viewing output from top(1) would be less than ideal. (This seems to get better with firmware, and being "smart" about which places of the screen get updated, generally) The appeal, at least to me, is that they can display inf…
I feel like I'm missing something - why do you need it to run on battery if it's consistently monitoring a specific machine? Isn't their power pretty much anywhere you'd need something like this?
Re: Integrating a VT220 into my life
#67Quasi-related: I've always wanted an ultra-low-power dumb terminal using eInk paper displays - something you could hit days of runtime with using a small battery pack. eInk uses no power when they're not updating - so idling or long-running operations would hardly use any power. So far the easiest approach I've found is using a hacked Kindle with an attached keyboard. You can run a terminal client on it and ssh into…
I'd really love to have one or five of those for maintenance work. There's a lot of devices that I don't really need to have a keyboard and video connected to for 99.99% of their life time, but I still need an LC display and KVM switch connected to for about 10 minutes per decade. It's such a waste.
The Kobo line seem nicely hackable.
They have a horrible bit of forcing the user to connect an account online during first power-up. This can be avoided with a bit of SQL. This site talks about "activating" without the desktop app (and other bits of tinkering):http://uscoffings.net/clc/tech/embedded/kobo-touch/
>Connect the Kobo via USB, and mount its onboard storage on your desktop machine.
> Ensure you have an SQLite3 database browser installed, or some way to execute SQL. For example, sudo apt-get install sqlitebrowser
> Open /mnt/onboard/.kobo/KoboReader.sqlite.
> Execute this SQL: insert into USER values("foo", "foo", "foo", "foo", "foo");
> Save, unmount, and disconnect.
Here's a bit about enabling Telnet (and cross compiling for Arm7): https://github.com/drj11/kobonotes
Here's someone who turned their Kobo into a GPS for their glider. http://hackaday.com/2014/05/28/e-reader-becomes-sailplane-an...
Re: Integrating a VT220 into my life
#68Looking at that workspace I just need - another large monitor - my MTG cards collection back - at least four magic cubes - a nerf gun and ... a VT220. At least I got that very same keyboard already. Seriously, that looks like a really nice working space, completely ignoring the fact that I just learned about sway (I'm on i3 here) in the process.
If there is a ping pong table, rubix cubes just start mysteriously spawning around the office.
Re: Integrating a VT220 into my life
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn't the very slow refresh rate of eInk be an issue here?
I actually found a video of a Kindle being used as a terminal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymei7UwBgX4 Looks like it's running a pretend-terminal website which probably explains the latency (the Kindle does not have a fast processor). Way on the other end - here's a Dasung 13.3" eInk monitor (i.e. you feed it DVI and it handles all the display driving for you). It can be yours for a cool $1000. I'll pass, but it'…
FYI, I've seen virtually zero latency running livereload experiments with the embedded browser in my Kindle, the basic 3rd-gen 2014 model.
My method was extremely rudimentary - inotify -> long-polling JS (being fed entire new file) -> innerHTML rewriting, with the Kindle connected over 802.11g - but hitting Save in my editor produced updates on the Kindle's display in around around 20-40ms.
I would put a moderate amount of money on the possibility that the latency is coming from the fact that the terminal app in the video is being run on a non-local server, and that keystrokes have to go up to the cloud-hosted app and then come back down to get onto the Kindle's display.
If the whole thing were local (with the terminal app hosted on target system, ideally) I expect updates could happen in Also, the CPU is a 1GHz i.MX6 (@ 996MHz), next to 400MHz LPDDR2 (@ 396MHz). It performs quite well in my experience; it's the OS that's terrible. :P
(The best OS I've yet seen was the one on my Ericsson MC218, which let me drag windows around the display faster than the LCD crystals could physically keep up. Solid windows, not outlines. On an ARM7TDMI running at 36MHz.)
Re: Integrating a VT220 into my life
#70Quasi-related: I've always wanted an ultra-low-power dumb terminal using eInk paper displays - something you could hit days of runtime with using a small battery pack. eInk uses no power when they're not updating - so idling or long-running operations would hardly use any power. So far the easiest approach I've found is using a hacked Kindle with an attached keyboard. You can run a terminal client on it and ssh into…
Kind of random, but you made me think of it. I always wanted to do an entire site in PDF, with all the links opening other pdfs on the same server. That or postscript...
What about markdown files and relative links? Works on Github and MacDown.