Back on Track

Well it took a while, but the 32GB SD card in my dedicated mp3 player zipit for the car is finally almost full to capacity with golden musical nuggets from the 70's and early 80's, ripped from my ancient collection of vinyl - scratches and all.  I've also installed a zipit in the bedroom as an internet radio player, and tossed in another 32GB SD card with a different set of mp3s from my record collection that I consider good sleeping music.  Well, it's too sleepy for the car anyhow.

Meanwhile the holidays are fast approaching, so I should have enough free time soon to resume some of the projects I'd started on before the music break.  I've got a few small things that might be worth posting already, so I'll start with that stuff.

I have plans to shrink up the links browser some more, perhaps significantly, but in the meantime here's the one I built a while back with most of the help messages stripped out for the languages I'll never use.  Saves about 100K on the jffs for stuff I might actually want.

links-100k-less-help-iz2s.zip

I also spent some time trying to decide which of the goodies on the french jffs I wanted to include in mine.  Dronz has a slightly different mix of stuff.  At one point his blog had some pretty pictures of his jffs, but that all seems to have disappeared into the vast internet memory hole.  Oh well, I can still look at the files.  There's a few programming languages and a serial terminal on the french jffs that I suppose could make a zipit with no SD card into a servicable test tool in an emergency.  Hmmm.  I only have the serial port mod on one zipit, but it's got uboot on it and I'm unlikely to convert it back to the stock blob bootloader just to play with the serial port in iz2jffs.  However it did get me curious about the ssterm program.

I looked at ssterm before, but not for long because it's written in python so I figured it was too big for the jffs.  But it has some features not available in picocom so I went back for another look.  Turns out the source is in a git repository, and with a little poking around I found my way back to a previous version written in C.  I grabbed the last version of code before it was rewritten in python.  It's somewhat newer than the one rkdavis provided many years ago, so I compiled it with small code complier options and here it is.  Someday maybe I'll put a serial port on a stock zipit and try it out.

ssterm1.2-iz2s.zip

I also added a setlogcons applet to my lcdval multi-call-binary utility.  It was a pretty good fit with the other console utilities in there, and it should be handy for redirecting pesky kernel log messages away from the serial port if you're stuck using the minimal ramdisk busybox available on the jffs.  The bigger full iz2s busybox build already has a setlogcons applet.

lcdval-setlogcons-iz2s.zip