New Years Resolution

I often find myself booting the zipit off in a dark corner somewhere, so I thought maybe I should let the iz2jffs startup script dimly light the keyboard LEDs, just before the wifi setup, and then turn them off again after. That way I can see the keys well enough to type a password when I need to.  So I made a tiny script called kbledsdim to run the kbbrightness utility from EZ2S.  I also converted kbledson and kbledsoff to similar scripts instead of full executables, so the jffs disk space useage remains about the same.

Now you can't see the keyboard in that picture, but perhaps you can see that I've started making some progress with the ANSI escape sequences.  I polished up the wifi startup scripts with some more color and better default hints.  Combined with the dim keyboard lighting, the wifi config is now bearable.  Maybe I don't need the ANSI escape based dialog boxes after all.

However I also finally got the ANSI escape based dialogs working at a reasonable speed by substituting the echo command for all of the printf calls in the demo script.  Since echo is a builtin function in the busybox sh, it runs about 10 times faster than external printf commands.  This was quite a challenge though since printf has way more formatting capabilities, and the builtin echo command doesn't accept the "no linefeed" switch so moving the cursor gets tricky.  Also the scripts are now tied to the specific busybox sh in the stock zipit initramfs.  Bash and the newer iz2s busybox sh require the -e command for echo to process the escape sequences.  Maybe I can fix that with a test and an alias for echo at the top of the script.  Yeah, maybe someday...

Of course now that I've got the desired speed, I need still to convert the demo into a reasonable set of working dialogs.  So far I've just added a little bit of code to manipulate a highlighted selection bar with the arrow keys, and then launch the currently selected option with the enter button.  I find that handy because even with the keyboard lit up like a Christmas tree it's still hard to find the number buttons, as they're printed in tiny red letters that don't light up.  If anyone wants to play, here's the work in progress on the scripts pictured above.  Some parts still require the iz2s busybox, so be careful with these scripts if you haven't loaded that on your jffs.

iz2jffs-scripts.zip

Turns out stty is crucial to the arrow key parsing and it's not available in the base system, only in the iz2s busybox which I currently have upxed on the jffs of my zipit.  That makes it way too slow to capture the multi-character arrow (and function) key sequences reliably.  I can make it better by only calling stty once, but it's still not an optimal solution, especially since the base jffs has no stty command.  I think I may have to try building a stripped down standalone version of stty...