Blinky Lights

Not so long ago I mentioned that the dronz alarm clock in the jffs was nice but... even with the lid closed the LEDs on the zipit are too darn bright and keep me awake.  At least they're only green and amber, and not those evil blue ones that seem to be popping up on just about everything these days.  I swear the blue ones can trigger migraines and burn holes in the backs of your eyes, but that's a story for another day.

Anyhow, the LEDs have gotta go if I'm gonna get any sleep.  I already had a utility for controlling the right LED, so I just dug up the GPIO numbers for the other two LEDs from the wiki, and patched it into the existing IZ2S powerbutton and lid checking MCB program.  The only tricky bit was the GPIO for the  middle LED defaults to an input for some strange reason, so I had to borrow some more code to set the direction register.  That seems to work, so now you can softlink the new "lid" executable on the jffs (or copy it on IZ2S) to a bunch of new utilities for the left and middle LEDs.  I also added commands to query the current state of each of the LEDs, so they can be saved when the clock starts up, and restored when the alarm goes off.

Here's a zip file with the new "lid" executable, the source code, a script to make all the softlinks, and another script that prints all of the current LED states.  Nothing really exciting, but hey, I need my sleep.

ledctrl-iz2s.zip

Summer Vacation.

Wow, July is half over and I haven't posted anything for weeks.  I've done a little bit behind the scenes, but every time I settle down to tackle something on my todo list the dog gets the urge to go outside and play.  And somebody has to go with him.  It's not so bad though...

It's actually kinda tranquil now that the bridge replacement is finally finished.

So what have I got to show for all this lack of effort?  Well, not much, really.  I did update a few previous posts with new qemacs executables for IZ2S, z2sid, and openwrt.  I really like qemacs now that I've added the missing features.  I still have to try and make a real openwrt project for it, but I'm slowly inching closer to that particular goal. 

Projectgus opened up the openwrt-zipit project on github, so I've been trying to learn more about github and the openwrt build system.  To do this I decided to update nupdf from a mipsel-only openwrt package to one that builds against the same (more current) mupdf shared libs as the fbpdf package.  The nupdf source archive appears to be inactive, so I cloned it onto github to do the update, and then added the zipit keyboard patches.  I then borrowed openwrt Makefile settings from the gmenu2x package to fetch the nupdf package via git from github instead of svn from google code.  Seems to work. 

Apparently the old static IZ2S nupdf package also works on openwrt if you simply unzip it into /usr/local, so maybe someday I'll try and run it on z2sid as well.  I'm pretty sure it's already available on z2lite.

Oh yeah, I also finally posted the gcc/gdb package for IZ2S in this old post.