github.com/mvanveen/canvasflood

canvasflood

Send fire-and-forget UDP packets to an IP with set x y red green blue and canvasflood will dutifully display it into the raw linux framebuffer!

Compilation

Make sure your GOPATH is set. I do export GOPATH=$(pwd) when I'm running in this working directory, but I'm not sure if that's kosher golang yet. This env variable is needed to compile.

$ go get .
$ go build .

Running Locally

This has only been tested with Linux so far.

First, switch over to /dev/fb0 by pressing ctrl-alt-<F1>. You should see the familiar text mode TTY you normally get when you do this.

Then, run canvasflood. I reccomend doing this either in a tmux/screen session you can detach or a separate framebuffer, ssh session, etc. The logging of the process interrupts the framebuffer rendering (although that is sort of a fun glitch effect unto itself!).

$ ./canvasflood

The screen will clear, and possibly still show your login prompt. Send UDP packets with x y red green blue, where all parameters are integers. x and y are within the max screen width and height of the screen, and red, green, and blue are 0-255.

TODOs

• change packet format to something cleaner (fewer bytes)
• error handling (:warning: this is really important, current daemon is hell of fragile)
• resize framebuffer
• JSON API for metadata about screen width/height, stats, etc.
• UDP packet protocol to get value of framebuffer color at a given x, y
• filters?
• accept more than one pixel at a time maybe?

Thanks

Many thanks to @blueskymonster and @peterkhayes for their contributions at DadaConf to the MVP of this project, divflood. I am also indebted to @kaey's framebuffer library, which saved me tons of time with low-level framebuffer device hacking. I hope to send commits back everyone's way! :cake: :sparkles:

Contributions

Contributions are totally welcome, but be aware that the overall design of this project is still in heavy flux.