For a long time it's been bothering me that nobody seems to use the simulator. Could it be that having to compile it (on Linux, of course) is already too much of a hassle ?
If the simulator could just run in a Web browser, this would remove the barrier. But the simulator and the Anelok firmware it uses are written in C, not the sort of languages browsers tend to run. A few days ago it ocurred to me that it may not be all that difficult to compile C to something Web-friendly. I was thinking of Java bytecode at the time. So I did a bit of searching ... and found emscripten: http://kripken.github.io/emscripten-site/ Emscripted takes the idea one step further and generates JavaScript. Even better, it supports SDL for graphical output. My first attempts with the emscripten package that comes with Ubuntu didn't go too well, but once I built it from sources, making it all work was remarkably easy: https://gitlab.com/anelok/anelok/commit/374be26dde063459e2fa3f1bb31121c125ffcdd1 Build instructions (section "Building with emscripten") are at the end of https://gitlab.com/anelok/anelok/blob/master/sim/README The automatically generated Web page looks horrible, but the simulator in there works almost perfectly: https://anelok.com/sim/ The only issue I noticed is that the (simulated) LED doesn't want to blink. It will turn on and off fine enough, but not blink. To use the simulator: - load https://anelok.com/sim/ in a browser that supports WebGL - click and hold in the middle of the small black rectangle (the big rectangle is the console), until the Anelok logo appears, then release the mouse button. - enter the PIN, a V shape: top, middle, bottom, middle, top. ("Top" means to click in the upper third of the simulator screen, etc.) - click in the bottom position and hold. Release when the "Enter" icon highlights. - etc. This worked with Firefox without further ado, but Chromium insisted that the "Web page was not allowed to create a WebGL context". It turns out that there are a great many ways to make Chrome and Chromium not support WebGL, though it will do so quite merrily if asked persistently enough. Very useful instructions for talking Chrome into allowing WebGL: https://superuser.com/questions/836832/how-can-i-enable-webgl-in-my-browser Note: if changing settings requires a browser restart, it seems that just restarting from within the browser may not be enough, but one has to exit it completely, then run it again. - Werner _______________________________________________ Qi Hardware Discussion List Mail to list (members only): [email protected] Subscribe or Unsubscribe: http://lists.en.qi-hardware.com/mailman/listinfo/discussion
