File: doc-main.txt [RDoc Documentation]

BlinkenLights - Controlling the keyboard LEDs from Ruby

Author

License

This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License Version 2 as published by the Free Software Foundation: www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html

Download

The latest version of blinkenlights can be found at

rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=1021

The homepage of this library is located at

blinkenlights.rubyforge.org

Description

This Ruby library is named after an old joke, see

  http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/B/blinkenlights.html

It enables you to control the LEDs on your keyboard to signal digital numbers between 0 and 7, events like received/transmitted network packets, or just let them blink in visually pleasing patterns.

Beware: If you use BlinkenLights under Windows, not only the leds are switched on/off but also the related keys are pressed/unpressed! This could be quite confusing. ;)

Examples

The block form opens the TTY, that controls the LEDs, and closes/resets the LEDs it after the block has been processed:

 require 'blinkenlights'
 BlinkenLights.open do |bl|
   bl.off
   bl.circle
 end

It’s also possible to manually close the object:

 require 'blinkenlights'
 bl = BlinkenLights.new
 bl.off
 100.times { bl.random }
 bl.close

There are also two short examples examples/netblinker.rb and examples/loadbar.rb in the distribution directory of this library, that show how to let the lights blink if network packets are received/transmitted on your host or to indicate how high the cpu load average is.