Terminalscope
=============

Matt Sarnoff (www.msarnoff.org)
February 2010

The Terminalscope is an Atmel AVR-based, VT100-compatible serial terminal
that uses an oscilloscope or XY monitor as a display and a PS/2 keyboard
for input. It generates a raster scan in the same manner as a television.

The Terminalscope board uses two microcontrollers: an ATmega328P for display
generation and an ATtiny45 to read and decode keystrokes from the keyboard.
The ATmega328P reads keystrokes from the ATtiny45 over SPI.

For more project information, schematics, and setup instructions:
http://www.msarnoff.org/terminalscope/


Compiling
---------
Makefiles are included, and the project should build fine with avr-gcc.

To build the firmware for the ATtiny45, enter the "keybuffer" directory
and type "make hex". Then, connect the chip to your ISP programmer, and type
"make fuse" and "make flash" to set the fuses and upload the firmware.

To build the firmware for the ATmega328P, type "make hex" from the main
directory. Then, connect the ATmega328P to your ISP programmer, and 
type "make fuse" and "make flash".

terminal.c contains a fairly complete implementation of an ANSI/VT100
escape sequence interpreter. It might be useful in other projects.

video.c and video.h contain complete routines for manipulating characters
and lines in a 2D array of character cells.

Changing terminal settings
--------------------------
When the Terminalscope is first powered on, pressing the NumLock key
on the connected keyboard enters the setup menu.

You can store two "profiles" and change between them with the toggle
switch on the board. This lets you, for example, connect the Terminalscope
to either a PC at 38400 baud or an Arduino at 9600 baud without mucking
around in the menu.


Using with a *nix computer
--------------------------
The Terminalscope functions quite well as a serial console connected to
a Linux/Unix computer, using a 5 volt USB-to-TTL adapter or cable.

To get a login shell on the Terminalscope in Ubuntu (Karmic and newer),
type the following into /etc/init/ttyUSB0.conf:

start on stopped rc RUNLEVEL=[2345]
stop on runlevel [!2345]

respawn
exec /sbin/getty -L 38400 ttyUSB0 vt100


Then you can start the login process with
sudo start ttyUSB0


One last thing. When you log in, Linux will think the terminal is 80 columns
wide (it's really 54) and will assume it supports UTF-8 (which it doesn't).
To fix this, you should add the following to your .bash_profile
(assuming you use bash):

if [ "$TTY" == '/dev/ttyUSB0' ]; then
  stty rows 54
  stty cols 24
  export ROWS=24
  export LINES=24
  export COLUMNS=54
  export LANG=POSIX
fi


Custom fonts
------------
A 256-character, 6x8-pixel font is included in the "fonts" directory.
Fonts are simply .inc files (assembler include files) containing
256 eight-byte entries.

"font2inc.rb" is a Ruby script that will convert a grayscale PGM image
to an .inc font file. See that file for usage details. 
PGM images can be generated from many graphics programs, including the GIMP.