minitel
3615 GPT
by Max F (github, mastodon, max@e97.me)
I was recently given an old minitel, which I thought I might be able to use as a kind of dashboard that shows the time, weather, messages, etc. It didn’t surprise me too much to find that quite a few people had already been hacking on the minitel, which made it easy for me to carry out this project by following whatever I found that someone else had done before.
To start with, I made a USB adapter by following the instructions in Un minitel comme terminal linux USB. Partie 1 : Hardware. My soldering skills are nowhere as good as pila’s, so my adapter is a tiny bit bigger…
Then I started on the software. I didn’t want to just use basic ASCII terminal features, I really wanted to be able to use the original Minitel features, including the double-size text, the graphics characters, etc, that you can’t emulate via a basic VT100 terminal. And I found PyMinitel, an impressive library that can control a minitel, with both input and output, fonts, colors, etc, everything I need.
In order to develop the application without needing to plug in the real minutel, I wrote a small library that emulates a minitel screen, compatible with PyMinitel. Thanks to pygame, the minitel font, an extra graphical-characters font, we can display this:
At some point I changed my mind and started coding a ChatGPT interface, as a fun way to combine old and new tech. This was fairly easy to implement, using the python library provided by OpenAI.
Demo
Here’s the result:
Code
Everything’s at maxf/minitel