Character Font, Scrolling Text, API, Alternative Clock with Second Pixel

[kohlsalem]

Hi,

i implemented the followig features:

• converted the font from last CT Make demo scetch into this implementation
• added Screen.scrollText("Hello World!"); function that shows text
• added an alternative clock implementation using the font
• added a (static) blackout for the clock at night
• added a moving pixel to have the clock less static

to my assesment this changes should not change/break anything existing...

Best Michael

[jekkos]

Thanks! Very nice. This was a feature I was planning to add myself. Also the REST endpoint to send messages can now be used by home assistant, so the panel can display notifications.

[kohlsalem]

I added propper message handling and printing of graphs,. Obviously i am a little bit "under knowledged", i was very surprised to find my commits automatically added in this PR, i planned to have it in a seperate one.

However, @ph1p, has this monster now have a chance to get mergend?

[ph1p]

Hi @kohlsalem :) First of all, thank you so much for this PR! And it definitely gets a chance to be merged! I think display text is one of the biggest missing features. I also flashed it on my ESP32 and it works fine, except for long texts. My ESP hangs when sending texts that are too long.

Great work!

[kohlsalem]

Hmm, which version? in the vesion before my very last commit i found the same problem- aparrently it is not good to spend to much time in a http handler. However, in the most recent commit i fixed that....

Where is your upper limit? If it still crashes that would mean i can not blockout the loop for a longer time. Solvable but... ugly.

[kohlsalem]

thank you so much for this PR!

"Danichfüa!" Thanks for that project. Nicely crafted! It was looking so obviously ahead the the hacked scetch from C'T, that i decided to throw out the 8266 and soildered a esp32...

Just to see that a font is missing :-D i added the scrolling already to the 8266 code, so that part was c&p. Converting the font was a but more tricky and ended up in a monster-excel-sheet.

I added some fixes and a chapter to the readme. from my POV it should me somewhat ok...

[kohlsalem]

Closes https://github.com/ph1p/ikea-led-obegraensad/issues/9

[kohlsalem]

Thanks for proposals - yes, i have obviously overseen dev clutter.

@ph1p, delay is clear, that was already on my todo list. And as you said, should'nt be a big deal.

What would the loop flag be for? If you do not pass any repeat, the message shows only once.

I did think about some infinite looping (only show messages) undtil you press the button. Was that your idea?

[kohlsalem]

• Added Delay as parameter
• Added Scaling for the graph as patameter (miny & maxy)
• changed rendering of the graph from pixel to line
• Ammended readme
• and infinite message repeat

[kohlsalem]

and some bug fixes and minor improvements

[kohlsalem]

@ph1p Hi Phil, normally i should have no big pressure with the merge, but since i messed with the propper use of branches, i brought myself a bit into a situation i cant resolveby myself. trying to get the recently meged PRs i messed up beyond my abilities. Is there a way to merge this PR as it is, or shall i better startover with a new fork and try to recreate the PR?

[MauiKano]

I did add the changes from kohlsalem to my fork under https://github.com/MauiKano/ikea-led-obegraensad Works well for me an I do like the messages a lot. I used it for displaying a boot message in the main.cpp and started writing my own plugin FiveLetterWords. This randomly shows a word out of a large list of words from https://github.com/charlesreid1/five-letter-words . More could be done with that plugin. Oh yes, I modified the simple clock plugin and added a second indicator. I pixel that wanders around the edge of the frame which happens to have 60 pixels in total :-)

[ph1p]

Hi! Could you resolve the conflicts? I'll merge this afterwards. Thank you :)

[MauiKano]

you catch me on the wrong foot. which conflict ?

[kohlsalem]

Hmm. It is emparrassing, but cant resolve the conflicts (unless someone is willing to help me with the version control mess i probably created).

[MauiKano]

can you please be more specific ? I was able to pull your code into my fork and all compiles and runs well.

[kohlsalem]

lease be more specific ? I was able to pull your code into my fork and all compiles and runs well.

Well, despite my decades in software development if am maximum stupid in work with git. since i could not understand how to use it directly in vscode propperly, use it via the githup desktop. I tried quire some htings, but did not suceed to resolve the conflicts, Not logically (the seem minimal) but technically in github. If you could hint me via teams (michael@kohlsalem.com) would be awsome, as i said, i am a more than a little list in the branches...

[ph1p]

I'll fix the commit history and resolve the conflicts :)

[kohlsalem]

I'll fix the commit history and resolve the conflicts :)

you are my hero. I promise to do proper branches for my next feature and hope i can do better with this...

[ph1p]

I am now done with the cleanup. Please delete your branch locally and checkout your repository again as I have force pushed. I have tested the feature and it is not working as it should. The repeat flag does nothing. When the message has been sent, the previous state appears after the message and then the message appears again and again, seemingly randomly. Is this intentional?

[kohlsalem]

Thanks!

Well, i do the repeat every minute, may be that detail is not emphasized in the readme. So, every next full minute all message with a repeat flag gets repeated.

[kohlsalem]

shall i checkout ph1p:main? because there i cant find it yet.

[ph1p]

Ah I see. So the repeat is after 1 minute. This is a little bit confusion. It would be great to set this with delay and add a duration flag to determine how long it should take to see the text. What do you think?

Just checkout your repository:

git clone git@github.com:kohlsalem/ikea-led-obegraensad.git
# or 
git clone https://github.com/kohlsalem/ikea-led-obegraensad.git

[kohlsalem]

Hmm. I get your point. But Hmm.

The usecase i had in mind ist, that i have a default view. Clock, weather, game of live, whatever. And then some Infomessage shows.

Features i imagine:

• Show indicator, that messages are about to be shown (Blinking pixels in the 4 corners.
• Allow to confirm messages with the button. IF the button is pressed while showing, the message will be stopped

I like the idea to show the messages at the full minute, becaus i jus know when it will be shown again. If i set the duration it will become really random.

I could imagine a "urgent" flag, which shows the Message continuously until button pressed?

[kohlsalem]

@ph1p so, any thoughts on my proposal? Actually, since the PC is anyway alreasy to big for my preference, i would be somehow happy if you could merege it before i add new features...@

[c64emulator]

Der Messagetext sollte zur Sicherheit auf gültige Zeichen überprüft werden, bevor er ausgegeben wird: momentan bootet der ESP neu, wenn Umlaute (ä,ö,ü) im Messagetext enthalten sind. Anregung: zumindest die deutschen Sonderzeichen/Umlaute würde ich noch in die Tabelle in 'signs.cpp' einarbeiten.

[kohlsalem]

Autsch. Das tut echt weh. Super peinlich. Nicht validierter User-Input als Lookup in einem Array. Immerhin bin ich überrascht, das der ESP mit einem Speicherschutz daher kommt. ich hätte mit Random Pixel für die Umlaute gerechnet. Wird gefixt!

[c64emulator]

Ich denke, es ist sinnvoll, aus diesem PR mehrere zu machen. Das Plugin mit dem Zeichensatz sollte abgetrennt werden. Die Nutzung des Zeichensatzes könnte lizenzrechtlich problematisch sein. Als Plan-B könnte auch ein anderer Zeichensatz verwendet werden (z.B. https://github.com/micropython/micropython/blob/master/extmod/font_petme128_8x8.h)

[c64emulator]

Noch eine Anregung für den Message-Teil: es sind ja noch ein paar Pins am ESP frei, ein Piezo-Buzzer könnte angeschlossen werden. Dann könnte bei einer Message auch ein Beep (oder sogar eine Melodie?) ausgegeben werden.

[kohlsalem]

Ich denke, es ist sinnvoll, aus diesem PR mehrere zu machen. Das Plugin mit dem Zeichensatz sollte abgetrennt werden. Ja, ich meine auch der PR sollte (in einner Bugfreien Version) erstmal reinmigriert werden. Wird sonst gefühlt einfach zu groß.

Zeichensätze wechselbar wäre z.B. definitiv ein separates Thema.

[c64emulator]

Noch eine Anmerkung zum Messageteil: Du nutzt ja momentan den 6x7-Font. Du rechnest damit auch in 'Screen.scrollText' (hardcodiert...). Zwischen den einzelnen Zeichen sollte aber mindestens ein Spalte Abstand sein, damit sie besser lesbar sind, wenn sie über das Panel scrollen.

[kohlsalem]

Hast Du das mit der Spalte mal ausprobiert? ich hab und hatte es für sch*** ähh, schlecht befunden...

[kohlsalem]

Ansonsten, für beliebige fonts /umschaltbare fonts müsste man das ganze irgendwie anders aufziehen. Da müssten die Maße dann aussen um das Array nochmal festgeschrieben werden. bzw, Es bräuchte ein Array von Fonts mit Metadaten(Größe, Namen, ...) den Fontdetails, ...

[kohlsalem]

• Crashes fixed
• Umlauts introduced
• Font handling introduced
• Better readable numbers in text
• Correct spacing handling

and still trusting that it is worth to be merged ;-)

[kohlsalem]

so, and as a (hopefully last) feature to this: While Messges are pending for display, an indicator is flashin in upper left corner

[ph1p]

Thank you! :) I'll take a look at it

[kohlsalem]

Merci!

[thunder-62]

aehm... apologies for the spoiler... Hopefully, I made made a mistake and someone can help me to get it corrected... When I send "http://192.168.20.59/message?text=ABC" in a GET request, my Display shows "789" seems like the index to an ASCII Table is somehow incorrect...

[kohlsalem]

Hmm, is it literally translating ABC to 789, or is that an example? I'm pretty sure it worked for ordinary letters.

• what did you exactly send and see?
• With what browser?
• could you try with wget?

i assume the call comes with bad coding. could you uncomment line 141 in messages.cpp? for(int i = 0;i<text.size();i++)Screen.scrollText(std::to_string(text[i])); That should print the char code which was recieved....

[thunder-62]

Hi kohlsalem, it is literally ABC-->789. first I tried using just Chrome then I installed the restman chrome Extension and sent it with a pure GET request. same result.

As soon as I am back, I will uncomment the line and tell you about the result... looking at the code: it writes the chars to serial right?

Cheers, Uwe

[kohlsalem]

Hi Uwe,

I'll check again today, anyway strange.

I cant see, what "Last Second" Change should have caused this, since this seems to be a obious Bug :-/

Best Michael

[kohlsalem]

Ok. I found the issue, without testing it. It was a last minute change - or the missing ability to use Copy&Past Properly. By making changes on the fonts for digits and creating a new "font" with bold digits, i apparently pasted them at the origin. And tested only with digits sinceafter - which works fine.

In file src/signs.cpp please remove line 86-95.

THe index numbers in the comments at the end should continuosly count up.

[thunder-62]

yessss... removing the lines was the fix! Thank you!

[kohlsalem]

@ph1p The duplication did not happen while i copied, apparently it is a glitch during your reformatting.

I do not understand, why you did reformat it? Yes, the source code is smaller, but after compilation... byte is byte....

The big benifit of thebin format (and the reason why i used it) you can see and modify characters directly in the code. That is lost on hex....