75 lines
2.8 KiB
Plaintext
75 lines
2.8 KiB
Plaintext
Blinkenlights Chaos Control Center
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If you have no clue what Blinkenlights is, take a look at
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http://www.blinkenlights.de/ first.
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This is a rewrite of the master control program for Blinkenlights. Our
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first implementation used to be a GTK+ application that allowed
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previewing of movies and run-time modification of the playlist using a
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graphical user interface. It turned out that we need a way to control
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the Blinkenlights remotely, so this new implementation runs as a
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daemon controllable via telnet connections. We started to use this
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software for the Blinkenlights installation at the end of September
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2001.
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Some parts of the code could definitely be redone better but keep in
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mind that this software evolved over time since we kept on adding new
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features while the Blinkenlights installation was already running
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every night from dusk till dawn. Actually we kept the software running
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all the time and just switched off power from the relais during the
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days. So this software has prooven to work reliable over a couple of
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months.
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How to compile:
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You need glib-2.0 available from ftp://ftp.gtk.org/pub/gtk/v2.0/.
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Once you have glib-2.0 installed, the usual
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./configure; make; make install
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should do the trick.
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How to use:
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Create a directory with blinkenlights movies. You can download some
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from http://www.blinkenlights.de/gallery/. Next, create a playlist of
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your favorite movies and call it playlist.default. The playlist format
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is simple: just add a line with a relative pathname for each movie you
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want to play. The examples directory contains some movies and a
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playlist to get you started.
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Start blccc in the examples directory:
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blccc localhost
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blccc looks for the file playlist.default in the current directory and
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starts to play the playlist. It now sends UDP packets to localhost (or
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whatever host you specified on the command-line). You can connect to
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blccc using telnet. It listens on port 2323 on the local interface.
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Type 'telnet localhost 2323' and it should welcome you. Try the 'help'
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command to get an idea of what is possible. You can use netcat (nc) to
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send commands to blccc so that you can control the installation from
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scripts or cronjobs.
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Now it's time to start blinkensim to visualize the stream of UDP
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packets:
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blinkensim
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blccc also listens for UDP packets on port 4242. This packets are
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generated by the blinkenisdn daemon (not part of this package) and
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describe the state of the isdn lines. If one of the telephone lines
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goes off-hook, the pong game is started. The game is controlled thru
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dial tones. The special sequence *<digits># starts the movie
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<digits>.blm from the on-demand directory. This is how the Loveletters
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feature was implemented. As soon as all telephone lines are on-hook
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again, blccc continues to play movies from the playlist.
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Have Blinkenfun,
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Sven <sven@gimp.org>
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