This is a small project intended to automate a 1541 Ultimate-II for a small art installation.
It's unlikely to be of general use as-is, but is presented here to give an example of how to automatically control a 1541U via its telnet interface. The author does not intend to do any further work on this code (especially given that a REST interface is planned for the next version of the 1541U firmware), but welcomes merge requests from the community.
The telnet wrapper uses pyte to manage a virtual terminal screen that can then be searched for the appropriate text.
Since pyte does not currently support ANSI colour (used by the 1541U to indicate which menu item is selected), we often have to guess.
This means that the programmer has to be very careful to track where they are in the menus, and makes the resulting code somewhat fragile.
(An expect_white_text method was added to partially address this.)
Also, C64 line drawing characters are not supported in pyte, so it's impossible to reliably detect where submenus begin.
As a workaround, the down_to_string function that scrolls within menus takes the starting line of the menu.
This is also somewhat fragile.
If you're interested in working with the telnet wrapper, the author strongly recommends enhancing pyte to support ANSI colour and line drawing characters, then using these features in the telnet wrapper.
Please see the issue tracker for other known issues and limitations.
Two options are available to make sure the 1514U is done drawing the screen, which should be done before interacting with it:
consume_to_timeoutis the most reliable since it waits for a configurable amount of time (in practice, the default of 1s has always been enough). However, it slows down the code for obvious reasons.expect_screen_drawwaits for a full screen draw by waiting for a "move" to position 23,1. This works well enough in practice (and is faster thanconsume_to_timeout) but is obviously fairly fragile.
Better designs are of course possible! Merge requests welcome!