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Trying to modify the VGA_Text driver. - Page 2 — Parallax Forums

Trying to modify the VGA_Text driver.

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  • GilesGoatGilesGoat Posts: 26
    edited 2014-12-23 14:56
    JDat wrote: »
    Can you share latest code? It's itneresting how you parse serial data.

    I'll do it in the end "when it's finished" as it is I am still debugging/sorting needs a bit of clean up don't want to give away something still 'too rusty" and with bugs I did not even test/look for :)

    However "one small question is due" .. I've seen here lot/all seems to be around the MIT license .. how would you feel with a "Creative Comms Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)" license ?

    The parsing is done via a simple state machine and 'stack' concept, params are pushed into a "params stack" and then the function(s) that process them grab then from the stack and continue execution until there are none left.

    A bit like :

    START : state = 0

    process (c)

    STATE 0 :
    IF c == ESC -> state = 1 : return

    STATE 1:
    IF c == [ -> state = 2 : return
    ELSE process "ESC something", State = 0

    STATE 2:
    if c == digit, add to param : return
    else
    if c == ';'
    push param on stack : return
    else
    STATE = 4

    STATE 4:
    repeat
    execute_case( c )
    until params

    reset stack, reset all, state = 0

    end process

    Something along those lines.
  • Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
    edited 2014-12-23 17:21
    As far as I understand everything in the Parallax Object Exchange (OBEX) is published under the MIT license. It's a very sensible choice for Parallax who want to promote sales of the Propeller. The Propeller is nothing without supporting code that implements all the peripheral devices that other MCU's have. That code needs to be usable by everyone, commercially or otherwise. It needs to have no strings attached like for example the GPL.

    Releasing your code under some other weird license only confuses everyone and makes the code less useful.

    Why do you feel the need to restrict commercial use and demand attribution? I know nothing of the details of the CC BY-NC 4.0 but I'm guessing that is what it is asking.

    Personally I would never use a license with such a long, pretentious and ugly name, in so many confusing variants and with such lengthy and unintelligible terms.

    The MIT license by contrast is short, sweet and obvious.
  • GilesGoatGilesGoat Posts: 26
    edited 2014-12-24 02:36
    Heater. wrote: »
    As far as I understand everything in the Parallax Object Exchange (OBEX) is published under the MIT license. It's a very sensible choice for Parallax who want to promote sales of the Propeller. The Propeller is nothing without supporting code that implements all the peripheral devices that other MCU's have. That code needs to be usable by everyone, commercially or otherwise. It needs to have no strings attached like for example the GPL.

    Releasing your code under some other weird license only confuses everyone and makes the code less useful.

    Why do you feel the need to restrict commercial use and demand attribution? In no nothing of the details of the CC BY-NC 4.0 but I'm guessing that is what it is asking.

    Personally I would never use a license with such a long, pretentious and ugly name, in so many confusing variants and with such lengthy and unintelligible terms.

    The MIT license by contrast is short, sweet and obvious.


    It's simply because "if I do something for FUN it has to be FUN and to learn something" .. if you want to look at the code, have some laugh/tought/make your own and go on it's okay .. if you are going to take it "as it is" slap on a product and begin to sell it and make $$$ then it's not ok, "I could have done it myself then" but that's not the intention ( "attribution" would be to prevent someone take the code as is, change the name from "Giles" into "John Smith" and say 'ok that's mine now I can sell it for $$$' ).

    I am not Parallax/the seller of chips/working in a contract for Parallax, I am a hobbyst coder maker.

    I guess that's another of those "problems" why I seldom put out docs/sources of the stuff I do , as an hobby.
  • potatoheadpotatohead Posts: 10,261
    edited 2014-12-25 11:39
    Many of us see it differently. The body of open code associated with the propeller came to exist with a lot of us learning something, improving on others, etc...

    Each contribution delivers more use value back to us than we put in. Either the learning was sufficient or it wasn't. Where it is sufficient, no worries.

    The good stuff happens when we aren't learning something, but just wanting to make something happen. Suddenly, there is a body of code there we can draw from, make it happen, and many of us find that high value.

    Frankly, I don't like the creative commons licenses for software. They are clunky, and more appropriate for documentation, art, and various other assets. Code type licenses are well adapted for code, IMHO.

    At any given time, some of us are learning, some of us are building, some of us are making money. We all work on the body of MIT code, and share back regularly to make sure that body continues to grow for all of us. Our roles could change. Say you learn something, get good, and then take a contract! This happens here frequently. Not only do you have what you learned to contract with, but you have what others learned too, which lowers your risk, enables the contract, and nets you margin on the work performed.

    Greetings, BTW! Isn't the Prop just fun?
  • GilesGoatGilesGoat Posts: 26
    edited 2014-12-25 13:44
    To be honest I am still thinking about all this .. and I am still not well sure about what to make of it, I am starting to think I may have made a mistake in joining this forum. I don't want to get a contract with anyone, and my point was exactly this, I am actually tired to be around environments where "everything seems to have a profit ending", I guess I will/may continue my road discovering Parallax my own way. I feel actually sorry I may have a bit careless joinimg something that it wasn't exactly what I was looking for, next time I should spend more time reading stuff like MIT licenses or such and understand what they fully mean. I think I'll take some time off to think better.
  • potatoheadpotatohead Posts: 10,261
    edited 2014-12-25 15:41
    I doubt you made a mistake, and there are plenty of us here to just have fun.

    Code sharing is always tough. Honestly, that's why I prefer the no worries MIT. Once I realized I don't care, I was then able to focus more on what I wanted to do, and that's the point of it on the fun gig, isn't it?

    One thing here is you will get lots of opinions. The crowd here tends to do that, and they do that, because most of us try hard. We just want it to work. Honestly.

    But nobody wants you to feel as though you have to do something, or push you away from having fun. For sure, that was not my intent. I just was contrasting a different way of looking at "but they made a product out of it", that's all.

    Take care, have fun.
  • LA6WNALA6WNA Posts: 138
    edited 2014-12-30 09:17
    OK, back to thread topic...
    I`ve been playing a bit with this driver "waitvid.80x25.driver", and I love the layout of 25 lines pr schreen.
    But I got a little problem: Can`t get this driver to put out the nordic letters "
  • kuronekokuroneko Posts: 3,623
    edited 2014-12-30 09:28
    LA6WNA wrote: »
    But I got a little problem: Can`t get this driver to put out the nordic letters "
  • Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
    edited 2014-12-30 09:30
    That's probably because "
  • TorTor Posts: 2,010
    edited 2014-12-30 10:53
    Before iso-8859-1 the way to get Norwegian characters was to replace the font ROM with one that had
  • LA6WNALA6WNA Posts: 138
    edited 2014-12-30 11:05
    Heater. wrote: »
    I guess there is nothing stopping you hacking on the bit maps of the font that must be in the driver somewhere.
    I know... but "in the driver somewhere???" . That`s not easy to figure out for me, cause most of the driver is written in the assembly language, and thats like greece language for me.... Maybe I should learn assembly one day... Would make it easier to hack whatever driver...,haha..
    Well, does`nt matter anyway. I mostly use English language at my VGA readouts, but sometimes it coud be nice with Norwegian..
  • Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
    edited 2014-12-30 11:24
    And this is where it all starts to go wrong....

    Firstly we need all those funny
  • LA6WNALA6WNA Posts: 138
    edited 2014-12-30 11:51
    Heater. wrote: »
    And this is where it all starts to go wrong....

    Firstly we need all those funny
  • edited 2014-12-30 14:26
    LA6WNA wrote: »
    Think I may make my own standard.....?

    Isn't that the standard way of doing things? Certainly more fun than copy and paste.

    Sandy
  • msrobotsmsrobots Posts: 3,709
    edited 2015-01-01 05:50
    Back to the OP

    I do really like @Heater. and @Potatohead. As a mostly lurker in this forums I stay away from criticizing anybody usually. But this thread is somehow different.

    So we have here @GilesGoat, a new member of this forum, interested in the propeller. Not that he is asking stupid questions, in the opposite. He is jumping right in the hard stuff, generating video and diving into the P1.

    It does not even matter that this guy works for Llamasoft. The same applies for any new member.

    He was asking good questions and got good answers from the black cat @kuroneko

    So far, so good. But then he got hammered by two of them open and/or free software guys, Religion again.

    Well done to both of you. Just scare them new customers away.

    As said before, I do like to read PHs posts (even if long) and I had some fun working with @Heater on the editor stuff

    But this is going to far Guys. You should openly apologize to @GilesGoat, even if it probably is to late anyways.

    First Giles get told to release his sources. (why?) Then he gets told that the license HE wanted to apply to HIS source is not correct, as of @Heater even TLDR and @PotatoHead lectures him about his current theme that it is full OK if somebody else is making money with code written by Giles because its for the greater good, or so.

    I personally find this very sad.

    Giles states that he is doing this for fun, and stating he does NOT want his work used commercial and two 'senior' members here are hammering him for NOT allowing commercial use?

    @GilesGoat left the forum. Sad thing. Might have been some @Hippy or @pullmoll, we will never know because he got scared away by two main contributors of this forum. Sad, isn't it?

    Don't get me wrong, all stuff I did with the propeller is MIT licensed and I am in general supportive of the free/open software idea.

    But is it a MUST now if you use a propeller?

    Very worried!

    Mike
  • Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
    edited 2015-01-01 06:39
    msrobots,
    ...But then he got hammered by two of them open and/or free software guys, Religion again.
    What?

    Firstly I do hope Giles is not offended or put off by any of my comments and certainly hope he has not left the Propeller community. We love to have people of the caliber of Giles around here.

    I have seen no hammering going on here and certainly have not intended to do any.

    Giles asked a question about licensing. I told a bit about what licensing goes on around here, suggested my approach and in return asked what Giles's motivation was in selecting a license. All seems like an innocent debate to me.

    There is certainly nothing "religious" about this. There are sound practical, economical, and even technical advantages to Open Source licensing. Truly open may not meet your own agenda though, that's fair enough.

    Nobody "told" Giles what license to use. Nobody said his choice was "not correct". We may have questions about it, which I think is fair enough. This is a forum for debate is it not?

    I'm not about to apologize for any of my comments in this thread.

    I don't much care what license people use but:

    1) Closed source - That's good. If you can sell a lot of your Propeller based product it's a win for Parallax which indirectly is a win for all of us.

    2) Open but non-commercial - That's better. That means there is more clever code hobbyists and others can use. The author may still sell his creation to commercial users.

    3) Open Source - Even better, hobbyists get more good stuff, the Propeller community grows. The author gets the support of the entire community and perhaps his creation is improved.

    Yes, free loaders may use that code to make money. So what? The author did it for fun, would probably have done it anyway, he does not lose anything by commercial use.
  • JDatJDat Posts: 103
    edited 2015-01-01 07:43
    Probaly I am big egoist, because I take objects from OBEX, modify them for my needs (remove unneccasary comments an unused functions), use and don't cotribute back to community. So far I have one commercial solution with JonnyMac's DMX sender, PhilPi's PBnJ serial (I like it better than FullDuplexSerial) and Chris Gadd I2C_pasm driver, Andy Schenk (www.insonix.ch/propeller) PAD debugger. Forum contributors about SPIN and ASM programming. So This is one time commetcial project. How bad it is, if I didn't ask autors about using their work in my project. Should I need to upload modified libraries and my code? Anyway, I don't care. Just learning from good code, and, of somebony need solulions, I am trying to use propeller instead of arduino.

    Main reason to to share my work is that code is messy, without comments. Doeas anybosy really want to see and analise messy code? There are no problem to share all my 120 MB of propeller code + info folder I You want.

    Regarding Giles. My, bad I asked him to show source soce. Why? I am badass and want some ideas how to parse serial data and ESC sequences. I need this idea to bould library called "Terminal Server". It a kind of serial parser and some ideas from nCurses. Imagine: You launch xter/PuTTY and connect serially (or via ethernet) to propeller and get command promp. You white commands, use backspace, DEL, ENTER, arrow keys, etc. I'ts just library to get user friendly interface. As soon it will be ready, I will upload it to OBEX. So. Sorry, i just seeking ideas to make things better.

    BTW. One one day I will try to test and modify TCP/IP stack for propellet and ENC20J60 module. There is another "stolen" idea about Radio Range measurement what I want to implement in propeller. So I am writing RFM01 and RFM02 library now.

    Lot of interesting self-educational ideas for spare time.

    Right now I can only give to community messy, bad quality code without comments.

    So, sorry for all this. I am trying to be good on this Year by telling my previous year's bad jobs. :-)
  • PublisonPublison Posts: 12,366
    edited 2015-01-01 07:55
    @JDat

    Your Hyperlink to "Radio Range Measurement" is not complete. Is this the one?

    http://www.instructables.com/id/Distance-measurement-with-radio-waves/
  • JDatJDat Posts: 103
    edited 2015-01-01 08:51
    @Publison, yes, you are right. Fixed!



    Good, bad, whatever. If anybody is interested, here is Torrent magnet link: [url]magnet:?xt=urn:btih:17087bd3f59971591a05197e2cff679839e4bf66&dn=propeller-experiments.zip[/url]
  • msrobotsmsrobots Posts: 3,709
    edited 2015-01-01 13:28
    well @Heater and @Potatohead
    you did.
    GilesGoat wrote: »
    To be honest I am still thinking about all this .. and I am still not well sure about what to make of it, [bI am starting to think I may have made a mistake in joining this forum. I don't want to get a contract with anyone, and my point was exactly this[/b], I am actually tired to be around environments where "everything seems to have a profit ending", I guess I will/may continue my road discovering Parallax my own way. I feel actually sorry I may have a bit careless joinimg something that it wasn't exactly what I was looking for, next time I should spend more time reading stuff like MIT licenses or such and understand what they fully mean. I think I'll take some time off to think better.
    he is gone. good work

    Sad

    Mike
  • potatoheadpotatohead Posts: 10,261
    edited 2015-01-01 13:37
    But nobody wants you to feel as though you have to do something, or push you away from having fun. For sure, that was not my intent. I just was contrasting a different way of looking at "but they made a product out of it", that's all.

    Please don't pin things on me I didn't have control over. I made no request for sharing of code. Notably, Giles was using shared code, and that was explained in the context of the license he was thinking on. It's fun to use shared code. That's what the point of sharing it is all about. Putting that into context isn't a crime, and frankly, it's worth doing so that people understand what they are getting and why they got it. What they do from there is up to them.

    Frankly, if it's all that fragile, the chance of sticking around is slim. Seen it before in many places.

    Giles is free to do whatever he wants, and that was made really clear. He's free to stay or go too, and he's welcome, also made clear.

    None of that is on me, nor Heater.

    For the record, I do not think it all should be shared, and I personally did not share all of the code I've authored. I'm sure others are in that place too. There will be code in the future I don't share too.

    Any of us is completely free to do that.
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