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3D animated graphics in XTerm

A project log for Silly software wishlist

Motivation to do some software projects by writing them down.

lion-mclionheadlion mclionhead 08/25/2021 at 19:390 Comments

This is an utterly pointless extension of the lion kingdom's regis protocol note.

https://hackaday.io/project/138050/log/157025-graphics-in-an-xterm

The idea is a simple 3D animated demo with a cube bouncing around.  There's no double buffering, so it would be a real clunky blinking cube.

Instead of recompiling xterm with the regis protocol, running xterm with the -ti vt340 flag, & not running screen, the same thing could be done more simply with a python library.  The only conceivable benefit to the regis protocol is displaying graphical data from a microcontroller without the hassle of making a new serial protocol with parser on the host side.  Having all the software self contained on the microcontroller would be a benefit.

There was once a real need when trying to display 2D graphics from a lidar sensor.  Normally, when lions need to visualize data on a microcontroller, the data comes out faster than the serial port can go.  Maybe it could visualize an IMU.  Microcontrollers normally want to show a voltage graph over time.  

The most obvious win would be a microcontroller oscilloscope over regis.  The lowly Rigol had only a 320x234 screen which could easily be drawn over serial port bandwidth.  The biggest challenge in a microcontroller oscilloscope is making the host software & serial protocol for drawing the waveform.

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