Blinkentools

We have created a collection of programs to display and convert Blinkenlights Movies under UNIX (including BSD Unix, Linux and Mac OS X).

The source code of all these tools now lives on GitHub.

PLEASE NOTE: These tools are outdated. The page will be updated soon. Until then, refer to the Hacking Arcade page for updated versions of everything!

Blinkenlights Chaos Control Center

The Blinkenlights Chaos Control Center (blccc) is our central software, that ran the playlist and the PONG Game in Blinkenlights. You get a more detailed description when looking at the contained README files.

Blinkenlights Simulator

The Blinkenlights Simulator (blinkensim) reproduces the original Blinkenlights sight on your Linux PC. It must have DirectFB installed. The simulator receives its data stream from the Blinkenlights Chaos Control Center (blccc).

iPaq Blinkenlights Player

The iPaq Blinkenlights Player (blipaq) is a standalone simulator for the Compaq iPaq handheld computer. As for the simulator, DirectFB has to be installed.

blm2gif und gif2blm

blm2gif converts a Blinkenlights Movie (.blm) into a GIF-Animation (GIF89a). So you can use all kinds of animation software to manipulate a Blinkenlights Movie.

gif2blm reverts this process: a GIF animation becomes a fully operational Blinkenlights Movie.

The converters try to retain the header comments of the Blinkenlights Movie. blm2gif uses GIF comments to store the header comments. When converting to BLM format (gif2blm), the GIF comments will be written back to the BLM file header.

Together, these programs allow combination of our Blinkenlights animation software Blinkenpaint (Mac/Windows) and other animation software or tools for GIF animations.

If you have a Mac with OS X you are lucky: you can run both Blinkenpaint and Blinkentools on the same machine. Linux users might try windows emulators like "wine" to run Blinkenpaint on the same host.

blm2gif Web Interface

If you like, you can convert your Blinkenlights Movie to an animated preview picture with our blm2gif web form.

blmplay

blmplay can display Blinkenlights Movies on a terminal with converting it first.

blgimp

blgimp is a plug-in for the image manipulation software The GIMP. The plug-in allows to open and save native Blinkenlights Movies. Using The Gimp you can use a powerful graphics software application to create and edit Blinkenlights Movies without prior conversion.

Any animation created with greyscale images on layers can be saved in BLM format. Like GIF animations, the delay of any frame is defined in the layer name. Existing GIF animations can be loaded and saved in BLM format. To be compatible with Blinkenlights, the image size has to be 18x8 pixels.

INSTALLATION: simply install the plug-in with "gimptool --install blgimp.c" (you need the GIMP Header Files - usually found in package gimp-dev).

Other Tools

Apart from our own tools, other people have taken up the idea and created other tools to display and modify Blinkenlights Movies.

flashlights

flashlights is a web-based editor/player for Blinkenlights Movies pretty similar to Blinkenpaint to interactively create movies. The tool is written in Flash so it needs Flash-Support on the client and because it can load and store movies on the Server it also needs PHP support on the web server. You can try and get the full source code from the flashlights home page at http://chronos.cyburrs.com/eskogen/flashlights/.

blinkenperl

blinkenperl is a small tool for displaying Blinkenlights Movies on the terminal with a couple of nifty options. More information at http://stray.ch/articles/blinkenperl.html.

blinkenmerge

blinkenmerge by Jörg Müller can mix Blinkenlights Movies and can apply a variety of cool filters at the same time (white noise generator, negativ, retime, shift, fade, blink etc.). More information at http://dingbats.digital.hdk-berlin.de/jfm/blinkenmerge/

blprint

blprint is a simple banner text generator for UNIX (written in C). It should compile on any UNIX system. Running texts are a bit boring but informative.

text2blm.exe (Windows)

text2blm is another scrolling text generator for Windows (written in C++) by Marc Schönefeld. You find the program and more information here.

bm_play.exe (Windows)

bm_play.exe is a BLM player with Blinkenpaint look for Windows.

blinkenscroller (Windows)

blinkenscroller is a program running on Windows allowing to convert bitmaps, catalog matrixes, create matrixes and 3D animations for Blinkenlights. You find more information and the program here.

SomeJavaForBlinkenlights (Java)

SomeJavaForBlinkenlights is a simple Java package for creating Blinkenlights Movies by F,C, Steinhardt. More information can be found here.