Native FBInk: Another small tool to print crap on your screen!

[knc1]

That's (the game of) life.
or
Maybe your K3 has detected an Alien life form.

[NiLuJe]

@PoP: I'll double-check, but I fixed a bunch of stupid things around "large" font multipliers, so that may already be taken care of (and by taken care of that might mean the max value will be clamped to the largest safe value ).

[NiLuJe]

@PoP: Yeah, it's "fixed" in master:

[FBInk] Clamped font size multiplier from 37 to 25

(Basically, there's a few gnarly interactions at "high" values, which may produce at a few key points of the code: overflows, divisions by zeros, blowing the stack. The easiest way to tame everything in one fell swoop is to ensure that the maximum allowed font size allows us to draw at least a 3x3 grid).

The double X was probably a side-effect of an overflow wraparound .
(I don't remember if that was already fixed in the latest release or not, but if you pushed the value a bit, you'd hit a SIGFPE because of the division by 0 I mentioned earlier ^^).

EDIT: I can *probably* fine-tune it a bit, if you really want to play w/ higher values .

EDIT²: Done, it'll honor the settings, so you can push things to the actual max when centering is disabled.

./fbink -cp -S 100 XX -F tall

[FBInk] Variable fb info: 600x800, 4bpp @ rotation: 0 (Upright, 0°)
[FBInk] Clamped font size multiplier from 100 to 50
[FBInk] Fontsize set to 400x800
[FBInk] Line length: 1 cols, Page size: 1 rows
[FBInk] Fixed fb info: ID is "eink_fb", length of fb mem: 483328 bytes & line length: 300 bytes
[FBInk] Kernel's HZ value appears to be 100
Printing string 'XX' @ column 0, row 0 (inverted: false, flashing: false, centered: false, left padded: true, clear screen: true, font scaling: x100)

./fbink -cp -S 100 XX

[FBInk] Variable fb info: 600x800, 4bpp @ rotation: 0 (Upright, 0°)
[FBInk] Clamped font size multiplier from 100 to 75
[FBInk] Fontsize set to 600x600
[FBInk] Line length: 1 cols, Page size: 1 rows
[FBInk] It's a perfect fit!
[FBInk] Fixed fb info: ID is "eink_fb", length of fb mem: 483328 bytes & line length: 300 bytes
[FBInk] Kernel's HZ value appears to be 100
Printing string 'XX' @ column 0, row 0 (inverted: false, flashing: false, centered: false, left padded: true, clear screen: true, font scaling: x100)

But

./fbink -cmp -S 100 XX

[FBInk] Variable fb info: 600x800, 4bpp @ rotation: 0 (Upright, 0°)
[FBInk] Clamped font size multiplier from 100 to 37
[FBInk] Fontsize set to 296x296
[FBInk] Line length: 2 cols, Page size: 2 rows
[FBInk] Fixed fb info: ID is "eink_fb", length of fb mem: 483328 bytes & line length: 300 bytes
[FBInk] Kernel's HZ value appears to be 100
Printing string 'XX' @ column 0, row 0 (inverted: false, flashing: false, centered: true, left padded: true, clear screen: true, font scaling: x100)

./fbink -cmp -S 100 XX -F tall

[FBInk] Variable fb info: 600x800, 4bpp @ rotation: 0 (Upright, 0°)
[FBInk] Clamped font size multiplier from 100 to 37
[FBInk] Fontsize set to 296x592
[FBInk] Line length: 2 cols, Page size: 1 rows
[FBInk] Fixed fb info: ID is "eink_fb", length of fb mem: 483328 bytes & line length: 300 bytes
[FBInk] Kernel's HZ value appears to be 100
Printing string 'XX' @ column 0, row 0 (inverted: false, flashing: false, centered: true, left padded: true, clear screen: true, font scaling: x100)

[PoP]

^ Thank you. Respect!

Now I can zoom to the max on alien Life from the UNSCII private area U+EC2B to U+EC30

(Just kidding, I know you did not convert these )

[NiLuJe]

That X alone was starting to look like a space invader... ;o).

[NiLuJe]

Released v1.2.6 .

A few code cleanups & tweaks, and the aforementioned fix for potentially broken behavior at high font scaling values .

[PoP]

When I saw a tweet using these blocky letters,



I thought it would be nice to make fbink print in that style.

Spoiler:

sweep

sweep:

#!/bin/sh
#implied PATH=$PATH':./'
cd /mnt/us
#Bug? or shell kwirk:
#  Must not start the ascii inline string with a space. 
#  starting with a space (as an ascii sweep should) doesn't cause fbink to print it!
#  block 0 0 2  $(cat ascii.txt) -c does work even even the ascii.txt file starts with a space
fbink -c "."
block 0 0 2  $(cat <<'EOF')
.!"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRowsTUVWXYZ[\]^_`{|}~
EOF
screenshot

Ready to try? Then

Spoiler:

123GO

123GO:

#!/bin/sh
#
#Prints the "ready to try?" screenshots for assembling the gif animation

cd /mnt/us
#implied PATH=$PATH':./'

block 8 4 5 "1" -c
screenshot
usleep 500000

block 8 4 5 "1.2"
screenshot
usleep 500000

block 8 4 5 "1.2.3"
screenshot
usleep 500000

block 2 5 13 "GO!"
screenshot
usleep 500000

somewhat buggy

[EDIT 2021-03-31] don't miss version 0.20 here

[NiLuJe]

@PoP: That's insane, I love it! ;p.

The other, non-scalable approach is a glyph per PNG w/ transparency.

Or going the extra mile and encoding that as a proper font in the Hex format, which we can then convert & bundle in fbink .

Sidebar: this works on my end:

./fbink '' 2>&1 | grep Line | sed 's/.*Line length: \(.*\) cols.*/\1/'
47

./fbink '' 2>&1 | grep Line | sed 's/.*Page size: \(.*\) rows/\1/'
64

:?

----

If not, I can easily add a flag that outputs the config in a single eval'able line?

EDIT: Done, might come in handy, and was trivial to implement.

./fbink -qe
viewWidth=758;viewHeight=1024;BPP=8;FONTW=16;FONTH=16;FONTSIZE_MULT=2;MAXCOLS=47;MAXROWS=64;isPerfectFit=0;FBID=mxc_epdc_fb;USER_HZ=100#

[PoP]

Originally Posted by NiLuJe

@PoP: That's insane, I love it! ;p.

The other, non-scalable approach is a glyph per PNG w/ transparency.

Or going the extra mile and encoding that as a proper font in the Hex format, which we can then convert & bundle in fbink .
...
Sidebar
...

I think it is fun to keep the scaling. Building in a 32x32 pixels font would be ideal, a worthy extra mile for special effects. Would you need some manpower?


Sidebar:

Yes I know, it is the assignment to a variable that gives me an unterminated quoted string shell error.

I will gladly use your new ./fbink -qe one liner and stop fighting puzzling shell substitutions.

[root@kindle us]# fbink '' 2>&1 | grep Line | sed 's/.*Line length: \(.*\) cols.
*/\1/'
44
[root@kindle us]# MC="$(fbink '' 2>&1 | grep Line | sed 's/.*Line length: \(.*\)
 cols.*/\1/'"
>

[NiLuJe]

The giant comment block in hextoc.py has a link to the Unifont stuff, if you want to look into it.

(The higher the grid-size, the longer you'll have to spend working per-glyph, obviously . But a higher base grid-size should not be an issue for FBInk, as the 8x16 Unscii Tall variant proved .).

[PoP]

^
OK I'll have a look.

In the mean time, not knowing the format, I prepared 32x32 Block Font.txt, could you use this?

[NiLuJe]

Hmmm, a higher horizontal resolution means a different data type (here, uint32_t instead of uint8_t), which is moderately more annoying to handle...

But other than that, yeah, that works.

row="........########................"
row.replace('.', '0')
row.replace('#', '1')
hex = '%0*X' % ((len(row) + 3) // 4, int(row, 2))

00FF0000

[NiLuJe]

Yup, got a test glyph working .

Now you get to choose a name for it .

[PoP]

Already!!

Originally Posted by NiLuJe

...
Now you get to choose a name for it .

"BLOCK", "TWEET", "ATOM", "V127", "PoP", Came to mind. Maybe "☐" or "6⃣ " to make it cryptic .

Anyway, you can choose too, it is yours now.

[NiLuJe]

@PoP: And there we go .

I wouldn't mind a full set of lowercase letters, when you have the chance .
(Some glyphs might need "kerning" tweaks, at a quick glance, some digits, for instance: printing "1234" makes it somewhat obvious ^^).

EDIT: Also, the last four characters have the wrong codepoint .

Found a minor bug in the conversion script while working on this, and this lays the groundwork for making BDF conversions even easier now . Everybody wins! .

EDIT²: Yuuup, BDF conversions are a definite go! .