[SWLUG] Serial terminal echoing(and things)

[Steve Anderson]

Kris Zani wrote:

> would like to see a few piccies of this though.  Sounds like a 
> thoroughly difficult and mainly pointless exercise - right up my street!!

When it looks less like a collection of components wired up sat in the 
bottom of a filing card box, and more like how I want it to look, photos 
will be forthcoming! Right now, it's really NOTHING to look at - it 
works in as much as I can boot it up, connect to the network and post to 
my blog through Links (that took some doing - think I'll do some 
scripting to make that less painful) and display stuff on the serial 
screen. The Nokia screen hack is forthcoming, and I'll be wielding my 
soldering iron next week to do that.

There's a couple of projects on SourceForge that got me going on the 
Nokia LCD lark, and it makes sense - easy to backlight and you get a 
small, graphical mono LCD for 99p plus shipping on eBay. I need to 
decide how best to drive it though - one of the SF projects is a C 
library, which means I'd have to dust off my exceedingly dusty C 
knowledge, and the other is a program that can display bitmaps on it, so 
I could prepare the time in sections, glue it together in any other 
language and squirt it down the parallel port. Not so elegant but nobody 
will see it =)

By the way, I'm also open to suggestions on programming languages. I'd 
originally fancied C# in Mono, because it's a skill I could use at work 
as well, or failing that Python. Both languages I fancy learning, and 
this *is* a learning experience.

Steve