Well, while I was at it tonight, I found that the text-based interface of pbLua isn’t very user friendly in comparison to the default LEGO NXT interface with it’s nice icons. Not that we need icons of course, but they’re cool. ;)

So I wrote a Lua class which can open XPM images, which are stored on the FileSystem and show them anywhere on the NXT-screen.

XPM images are also textbased, very ideal for our purpose, albeit they don’t have a very small footprint (the below image is 160 bytes, so it’s also not TOO big):

! XPM2
16 7 2 1
* c #ffffff
. c #000000
**..*...........
*.*.*...........
**..*..**.**..**
*.*.*.*.*.*..*.*
**..*..**.*...**
...............*
.............**.

Luckily MacVim understands this format and allows you to see it:

Right now this image is on my NXT display – inverse though, next is making the parsing a bit more flexible.

A good thing is that PixelMator can convert to XPM, so no manual editing of XPM files ;)

Now to see whether we can get the below image to show on the NXT screen (nope no colors):