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Re:ROSshow: ASCII art visualizations for robot sensor data by etatoby on Friday March 29, 2019 @08:45AM (#19521111)
Using Braille patterns is a pretty cool idea. But you're still using 3×8/2×4=3 bits per pixel, excluding colour information and SSH compression.

If you used the various extensions that are present in most terminal emulators (Sixel, and other proprietary/fringe ones) you could get at least 8/6=1.333 bits per pixel (for Sixel) if not better, depending on whatever the terminals support.

The results look good, here is an example of a project using Sixel:

https://github.com/hackerb9/lsix/

There is even vector graphics support in Xterm and other terminal emulators (Tektronix mode, and maybe others such as ReGIS) that allows you to plot a line from point A to point B (and other shapes for ReGIS) In Tektronix mode you can plot lines with perfect resolution (4096 over the width of the terminal) using only 5 bytes per line, no matter how long the line is across the screen.

These gifs are XTerm windows in Tektronix mode:

http://phk.freebsd.dk/AducLoran/animation.gif - http://phk.freebsd.dk/AducLoran/animation2.gif

You can even use gnuplot (over ssh if you need to) in an XTerm and have the plots shown in a separate window, using Tektronix mode emulation.

I think this mode would be better suited to some of your program's outputs.

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