[BRLTTY] Monarch BRLAPI Server

[kperry at blinksoft.com]

I sent this to APH 

-----Original Message-----
From: BRLTTY <brltty-bounces at brltty.app> On Behalf Of Elijah Massey
Sent: Tuesday, July 1, 2025 8:38 PM
To: brltty at brltty.app
Subject: [BRLTTY] Monarch BRLAPI Server

Hello,
I now have a working BRLAPI server running on the Monarch. First I wrote a
library in Rust to parse and write BRLAPI packets. Then I wrote a simple
server based on this library, and wrote an Android app that runs on the
Monarch and displays Braille output from this server on the Monarch's dot
matrix. After running the app, I can set braille-driver to ba and the
ba:host parameter to the Ip address of the Monarch, and start BRLTTY, and
have my terminal displayed on the Monarch. Each line of text is displayed as
its own line of Braille, and because of this I have found it useful to run
"stty cols 32", so that the terminal is 32 columns wide and text is not cut
off. This also works with Orca and speechd-el, with them connecting to the
local BRLTTY instance which forwards their requests to the Monarch. It even
works with NVDA, if you install BRLTTY on Windows, set the config values
mentioned above, start it, and set NVDA's Braille display setting to BRLTTY.
However, it seems that only BRL  TTY itself has good multi-line Braille
support, where it will display 10 lines of a document on the Monarch. NVDA,
Orca, and Speechd-el only display the current line of text.

Right now it doesn't support sending keycodes, Braille commands, cursor
routing, or panning yet, but the foundations of these things are there. It
also doesn't support the parameter request and update packets yet, or send
error packets. So it's still very much incomplete, although it's already
useful for displaying the terminal in Braille. If you want to try it, it's
on Github at https://github.com/emassey0135/monarch-brlapi-server . To build
it, you should only need Java and Cargo installed, although you might need
to run "rustup target add aarch64-linux-android" first. Then just run
"./gradlew assembleDebug", and you will find an APK in
app/build/outputs/apk/debug or something like that.

Sent from my iPhone
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