It's optimised for use on microcontrollers, not classic AVR but anything with ~32KB or RAM or more, and can do much better frame rates than more generic libraries. On real screens it's excellent.
As I've been fiddling around with displaying stuff on the Serial/Stream terminal I quickly hacked around one of the example sketches and made this.
Running on an ESP8266, the terminal baud rate is 230400, any higher generates garbage, playing the GIF back from a PROGMEM array. Terminal client is PuTTY.
It's obviously not high def video but it's oddly satisfying to make this ridiculous thing happen. The GIF is already optimised to mostly send changes, which helps a lot. A static GIF would display quite easily.
So displaying very basic blocky images in the terminal isn't impossible, I might look at integrating it. You'd have to 'curate' what images you displayed.
I also had a go at the badger meme GIF and because it's not optimised and sends just every line the result is far less satisfying.
In this update I show the work I've done on styling widgets with colours, different box drawing characters and different positions for labels/shortcuts.
Another update on my terminal interface UI library and after lots of code cleanup it now handles multiple editable text input fields. I started using OBS to capture the output with so this video is cleaner than the first ones.
To recap I've now got the following working as simple to create 'widgets', any of which you can have multiples of on the screen at the same time and swap between them with keyboard shortcuts or the mouse.
Buttons
Checkboxes
Radio buttons
Text boxes with scrollable content
Single line text input fields
At this point it's using more memory than is practical on classic AVR Arduino boards but I know I'll be able to reduce the footprint a lot later.
I have for a very long time wanted to build in the sort of 'scanning' you see in sci-fi movies to our LARP events as an actual working piece of tech. As the majority of our events occur outdoors the obvious answer is GPS. So I've made a gamble and bought forty GPS modules that came up just cheap enough to justify it to myself.
More so than other modules, cheap GPS modules seem to appear, disappear, then a few months later something similar but different appears on the market. I had identified some I wanted for this project a while back but then they disappeared and as I want to make a compact wearable with a 3D printed case, changing modules is non-trivial.
These super-compact modules look just the ticket and ordering them is an attempt to force my hand into making progress on this. The plan is that most things I build which are connected to the mesh network will have a GPS module. I did this a long time ago with the 'magic compass' but doing it at scale opens up the possibility of making something like the 'motion tracker' seen in Aliens etc.
More work on the terminal UI library, but I've now added radio buttons and a scrolling text window, useful for showing a larger block especially from an SD card or stored in program flash memory.
If loading from an SD card it would need to be loaded into the memory of the microcontroller, I've not yet added support for very large blocks of text.
A chunk of my work has always been about building things with microcontroller boards (either classic Arduino AVR or ESP8266/ESP32) that you interact with directly.
For our (postponed) LARP event in March I had created a fake 'computer terminal' that you interacted with, where all the work is done on an ESP8266. RFID cards log a user on and there was a chat application, file viewing and so on, all using my ESP-Now mesh network to allow the individual terminals to send messages to each other.
In order to make this I used ANSI/VT100 escape sequences to create a very simple 'application' that you accessed using a terminal emulator, PuTTY, running on old laptops.
It's not wrong to argue this is the 'tail wagging the dog' when there's a much more powerful computer just running PuTTY but the guiding factor was the mesh networking, not the application itself. It also meant anything you could run PuTTY on could quickly and easily be pressed into service as a terminal and PuTTY is available for Windows and Linux. Likewise any other terminal emulator that supported a broad range of terminal capabilities could be used, but all my testing has been with PuTTY.
In the weeks before the event, I was in a 'crunch' working on various props and technology for the game 14+ hours a day until suddenly we postponed due to the pandemic.
As irritating as this was it's given me time to turn this work into a re-usable Arduino library. Such things already exist to place the cursor, change colours and so on but the one I've been working on has 'widgets' like mouse-clickable buttons and does the work of drawing/updating them for you.
The idea is if you have an Arduino project that needs a user interface, perhaps one that's infrequently used, you can build this with minimal pain. Then to access it you just connect a USB cable and there's a terminal UI available over the serial connection. Sadly it does not work in the Arduino console monitor as it's not a proper terminal application, but PuTTY isn't onerous to install.
I have an aspiration this would be usable over the network on microcontrollers with Wi-Fi such as the ESP8266 but it probably has more value on those without. If you've got Wi-Fi, basic web server front ends are going to be more flexible.
