The films can be created by hand or with the help of Blinkenpaint, that allows one to create films „easy & quick“. More informations about the *.blm format and Blinkenpaint itself can be found on the Blinkenlights webpages. Apart from Blinkenpaint there are lots of other useful tools for download. Since the Littlelights hardware is not identical with the Blinkenlights hardware, modified software is required, and already there is a relatively large amount available.

The good thing of Blinkenlights was, that it has animated a lot of people to be creative and in the meanwhile it is working on both operating systems. The history of that is quite interesting. Blinkenlights was running on 3 Linux machines, which were communicating via network. Only for that the blinkenlights-protocol was developed. But the development of the LED-reproductions went into 2 different directions. Blinkenminni built in a greyscale-function and created the BlinkenMini Movie Format(.bmm) and was using Linux. While the BlinkenLEDs faction only programmed for Windows. The hardware was almost the same, beside the greyscale-function. Under Windows it was possible to use JaLCDs. With that you had nearly unlimited possibilities of displaying functions like weather, analyzer, clocks, charts, heise ticker, all status reports of the PC reaching from processor-temperature and memory capacity upto fan revolution, ICQ, getting mail and so on. Everything that was not implemented yet, could be built in by yourself or you asked in the forum for it. On the other hand you could use the original software from the BlinkenLights project blccc under Linux, because Blinkenminni supported the blinkenlights-protocol. But that was not really fun, because some people [especially me ;-)] wanted to use all features. The Windows people (except some guys) did not really like the idea of publishing the source. But finally you could get everything you wanted in a roundabout way. At this point thanks a lot to 1stein from Blinkemini, who never got provoked and always reacted according to the principle "Don't panic!". He patched the BlinkenPlayer Exxtreme into the blinkenlights-protocol and that is, why now it is also possible to enjoy all network-functions under Windows. The programmer of the BPE liked it and built it in officially. Linux now also profits from the JaLCDs functions, because with the BPE on one and net2bmdrv on the other side it is possible to pack jaLCDs reports into the blinkenlights-protocol and display them. I think it is a nice example, how cool it could be, if everyone is working together no matter if Linux or Windows, the goal is the blinking result.

Important! Before the software described below can be installed, the port I/O drivers have to be installed. These allow direct control of the ports under Windows 95, 98, Me, 2000, and XP. Without these drivers nothing will work.
The drivers are available for free download from Scientific Software Tools at http://www.driverlinx.com.

In some cases it may be necessary to install the Visual Basic Runtimes 6. These can be found on CDs that come with magazines and in the internet. A search engine should find some results.

To be able to use the functions of the Winamp player, version 2.x is required. The 3.x versions are presently not supported. The latest Winamp 2 version is 2.91 and can be downloaded at http://classic.winamp.com, where also the necessary VBLink Plugin can be found.

The software will only be quickly introduced and not described in detail as most functions are relatively easy to use and more ore less self-explaining. Should there nevertheless be any problems try http://www.jalcdsforum.de. Most problems have already been discussed thouroghly. The searchfunction can also be quite helpful.

Except for UDP, BlinkenTool supports nearly all the functions of the BPE in a more compact form. Furthermore a drawing-function is implementaded and the possibility to make and invert movies. The digital clock can be loaded with different font types. This tool was running under Win 98Se and 2000 SP3 stable and without any problems, too.
Download: http://www.jalcdsforum.de

To all tools I can say that they are running without any problems and are very intuitive to use. Who worked on this topic a little bit, will cope with the tools easily.

Just Another Liquid Cristal Display Software is basically an LCD Software. A huge amount of variable can be generated by jaLCDs and read with UDP-capable players. So its possible to diplay news, weather, status-reports of all kinds. JaLCDs (v.3.1 instance 1) was running under Win 2000 SP3 without problems. [screenshot]