RichardNeill.org

Personal	Academic	Thoughts	Technical	Various
Richard MacNeil clan Photographs	Ph.D. (COAST) M.Phil. (Si nanowires) Curriculum Vitae	Liberty Philosophy Penguins	Software Linux - Thinkpad A22p VoIP guide	Links Humour Feeding Google

Scripts and Source Code

Introduction

I've written quite a lot of bits of software: this page collects them in one page.

Linux Utilities:

help_to_man - write documentation once, inline in the program ("myprogram -h"), then autogenerate manpage from the Makefile.
trashcan - a trashcan script (use "cn" instead of "rm").

Hardware control:

PulseBlaster - a driver, utilities, and parser for the SpinCore PulseBlaster digital timing device.
NI 4462 - National Instruments NI4462 - in C, under Linux. Data-capture code and lots of experimental notes.
Arduino delay - manage a variable-length FIFO delay-line via an Arduino, from the Linux command-line
FTDI245 module - bit-banging a USB 8-bit parallel-port in C.
QuickUSB module - Linux Kernel driver for a USB 2.0 fast 16-bit parallel-port device.

Physics PhD:

Maths - some Python programs to plot data to graphs, with optional FFT and linear-regression.
IRCamera - control utilities (for my PhD camera, not widely useful elsewhere).
Cam2Tiff - convert the .cam format to a .tiff file (may be useful as an example of using libtiff)
Filterctl - control the filterwheel (purely for documentation of my PhD camera system, no use to anyone else!)
Hawaii simulation - simulate the Hawaii sensor (purely for documentation of my PhD camera system, no use to anyone else!)
Hawaii sensor - characterise the Hawaii sensor (purely for documentation of my PhD camera system, no use to anyone else!)
See also hardware control: PulseBlaster, NI4462, Arduino, FTDI245 and QuickUSB.

Fun stuff (toys):

Dinner Dog Daemon - a Wifi enabled Raspberry Pi mealtime announcer, with Phone app. Self-contained and complete.

Odds and Ends (one-off hacks):

RioFix - create the required misdirected-playlist structure to make .m3u playlists work rightly on the Rio Karma MP3/Ogg player.
ADSL Watchdog - monitor script to automatically reboot the Comtrend Nexuslink 5631 router when it hangs.

All of this is Free Software, which you are welcome to use, repackage and distribute. It's mostly GNU GPL v3+, though some are GPL2 or GPL2+; check the relevant README.

Linux Utilities

help_to_man (generate man pages from -h)

Introduction: Manpages are really important and frequently neglected. This script makes it really really easy to automatically generate well-formatted man pages in your Makefile. This is an "improved" version of help2man.

Download: help_to_man has the full details, an example, and a howto.

cn (a trashCaN script)

Introduction: How many times have you typed 'rm somefile', and then wished you hadn't? Do you want something more helpful than merely the advice to keep regular backups?
cn is an alternative to rm: this is a much safer habit (it also improves on the habit of expecting alias rm="rm -i" which isn't always present on all machines).
This shell-script with the Freedesktop.org trash specification, so it works with the KDE and GNOME GUIs, and it prompts exactly once, no matter how many files/dirs you are trashing.

Download: cn-1.21.tar.bz2, then untar, make, sudo make install. Invoke as cn and see man cn.

Update: you can achieve almost the same effect by adding this line to your ~/.bashrc:
function cn(){ /bin/mv -f --backup=numbered -- "$@" $HOME/.local/share/Trash/files ; }

Hardware Control

PulseBlaster

Introduction: this is a driver, utilities, and parser for the SpinCore PulseBlaster digital timing PCI device. The PulseBlaster can drive 24 TTL lines with very high precision with pulse lengths from 90ns to 2 years.