Progress, of a sort

[mdlbear]

Spent the entire afternoon working on the Y.D.'s science project (which, as readers may recall, is a talking compass. With surprisingly little trouble, I got the boards wired up and the sample application working. (This involved two trips to Fry's for parts, plus compiling the Console application on my Linux box.

But now I'm basically stuck: there appears to be no way to run the Console as a "dumb terminal" that I can embed into Linux scripts and pipelines, and there's no obvious alternative. The sample programs and documentation are, um, unhelpful. It looks like the only way to do it will be to hack the Console app itself so that it does generic character I/O and avoids the ncurses cursor-positioning stuff. Fortunately, I have the source, so I can do that.

The alternative (which I may well use for the user testing, especially if it's due this Friday) is to display on the regular console and have a human assistant (probably me) perform the text-to-speech function.