This weekends In The Other BSD's section had a link to a nycbug thread about presentation software. That was strangely apropos, last week I made slides for a lightning talk using my own template and beamer just exploded. I fixed the issue with beamer, I was pretty upset, upset enough to try looking for other software to use when I can.

At the start of the nycbug thread suckless sent is mentioned. sent is a really simple presentation tool that, it takes some input files and shows them as a slideshow. No pdf output, no templates, just a presentation.

sent isn't packaged in FreeBSD, suckless make it rather easy to build their tools(you normally edit a header and rebuild to do config) so I grabbed the source and built it.

I had to add some search paths to get it to build:

$ git diff
diff --git a/config.mk b/config.mk
index ed08199..6f5f3e4 100644
--- a/config.mk
+++ b/config.mk
@@ -11,8 +11,9 @@ X11INC = /usr/X11R6/include
 X11LIB = /usr/X11R6/lib

 # includes and libs
-INCS = -I. -I/usr/include -I/usr/include/freetype2 -I${X11INC}
-LIBS = -L/usr/lib -lc -lm -L${X11LIB} -lXft -lfontconfig -lX11 -lpng
+INCS = -I. -I/usr/include -I/usr/include/freetype2 -I${X11INC} -I/usr/local/include -I/usr/local/include/freetype2
+
+LIBS = -L/usr/lib -L/usr/local/lib -lc -lm -L${X11LIB} -lXft -lfontconfig -lX11 -lpng

# flags
CPPFLAGS = -DVERSION=\"${VERSION}\" -D_XOPEN_SOURCE=600

Sent just expects paragraphs of text.

For the past month or two the uboot on the FreeBSD RPI-B images has been unable to boot on most sd cards. This weekend a new version of uboot was released and new images were created. The new images boot no problem and I am finally able to try this cheap 5 inch screen I got on ebay.

This weekend was the first 57N Stupid Shit No One Needs Hackathon . I tried this weekend to perform serial comms over a string and cup using the msp430 based TI Launchpad.

I had the tone generation working really quickly and then spent 15 hours trying to demod and tones and find a byte stream using a microphone. I had no chance, it didn't work at all.

I was able to transmit the tone a long the string over 3 meters of room. So the core idea does work. I think I will try this project again after reading some more dsp.

Hibby and I were happy to announce the first 57N Stupid Shit No One Needs Hackathon this week. It isn't often that you come across a strange link in your search history and it turns into an awesome event, we seem to have beaten the odds.

The first Stupid hackathon I read about produced some of the coolest ideas for pointless things I have ever seen. The best one to make the event clear has to be endless.horse .

So what are you going to do Tom?

Of the many terrible ideas I have each day, only a few are worth spending 48 hours polishing to death. This coming weekend I have decided to take two technologies I have been gradually learning, mirco controllers and DSP, and build the most terrifyingly bad things I can think of.

So tomorrow prepare yourself to see the start of a paper cup and string telegraph being forged in 57North Hacklab.

Just before I left work yesterday I built one of the gimme boards I got earlier this week and connected it up to a goodfet . I had to do a little source editing to let the goodfet run and connect to the correct serial port. If you need to change the serial port from the default it is a quick grep through the source tree to find literal string "/dev/ttyU0" to change.

I followed the instructions on the git repo for the specan code . The first time I ran the flasher the IM-ME booted into the stock firmware again. I erased the flash, tried again and it all worked. I am not sure how long the flashing took, but if you will be holding gimmme expect it to be a few minutes.

To flash the IM-ME I did:

$ goodfet.cc erase
$ goodfet.cc flash specan.hex

This turned out to be a lot easier than I expected, everything seems to be well documented. If you can get an IM-ME and want to flash it with a goodfet and a gimme, send me an email and I will send you one of my spare(partially assembled) boards.