utils

Utility tools and scripts

Scripts

• datestamp.pyw — drag & drop files to prepend a live, editable date/time stamp to their filenames.

• lowres.pyw — drag & drop images to shrink them (aspect ratio preserved) and save alongside the original with a _lowres suffix. Choose how: max size in pixels (default 1024x768), a reduction factor (2x, 5x, etc.), or a max file size in KB (default 100 KB, finds the highest resolution that fits).

• pdfmerger.pyw — drag & drop (or add) PDFs, reorder them, and combine into a single output PDF.

• screenreader.pyw - takes a screenshot and parses the text selected by the user. Uses Tesseract-OCR to convert image to text. Tesseract-OCR is splitted into several zip files. Before running screenreader, right click Tesseract-OCR.zip.001 and select Extract Here. The Tesseract-OCR directory will be created with the expected files already in place. This folder must exist at the same level of screenreader.

• imagecompare.py — command-line tool that compares two images via SSIM, prints the similarity score, and (optionally) highlights/saves/shows the differing regions. imagecompare.exe -a imgA.png -b imgB.png [-v] [-s]

• ccallseq.py — command-line tool that scans C/C++ source for function definitions and call sites, then prints a call tree (no compiler required, best-effort regex-based scan).

  ccallseq.exe <paths...> [--start NAME[(path)]] [--max-depth N] [--show-files] [--dot PATH] [--drawio PATH]
  # or: python ccallseq.py <paths...> [same options]
  

  • paths — files or directories to scan.
  • --start — function to start from. Omit it to print a tree for every function found. If the name was defined in more than one file, a tree is printed per definition unless narrowed down with NAME(path) (path matched as a substring, either slash style), e.g. --start "main(unix/plink.c)" — copy-paste straight from the tool's own output.
  • --show-files — show the defining file after each function name, e.g. main(unix/plink.c). Calls into recognized C/POSIX standard library functions show their declaring header instead, e.g. memset(string.h).
  • --dot PATH — write a Graphviz DOT file instead of printing. Render with dot -Tsvg PATH -o graph.svg, or import into draw.io (Extras > Edit Diagram).
  • --drawio PATH — write a draw.io (mxGraph XML) file, laid out with the pure-Python grandalf package (pip install grandalf if running from source) — no Graphviz install needed. Open the file directly in draw.io. The layout gets slow beyond roughly a thousand nodes, so narrow the graph with --start/--max-depth for large codebases.

Serial-to-UDP bridge

A pair of tools for forwarding a Windows COM port's byte stream over UDP and viewing it on the receiving end.

• serialUdpTx.c — reads a Windows COM port and forwards every byte to a UDP endpoint. Exits cleanly on Ctrl+C or once a kill-file appears on disk.

  serialUdpTx.exe <COMx> <baud[,parity[,data[,stop]]]> <dst_ip> <dst_port> <logfile> <killfile>
  serialUdpTx.exe COM3 115200,N,8,1 127.0.0.1 5000 C:\logs\bridge.log C:\tmp\stop.flag
  

• serialUdpRx.py — listens for the UDP datagrams from serialUdpTx.exe and reassembles/prints the serial stream line by line (datagram boundaries don't line up with line boundaries, so it buffers per sender until it sees a newline).

  python serialUdpRx.py                       # listen 0.0.0.0:5000
  python serialUdpRx.py --port 5000 --hex
  python serialUdpRx.py --host 127.0.0.1 --port 5000 --logfile rx.log
  

Release

Dependencies

PyInstaller

pip install pyinstaller -r requirements.txt
python -m pyinstaller --onefile --windowed --name datestamp datestamp.pyw

Build locally

Run build.bat to build every .pyw script plus imagecompare.py and ccallseq.py into standalone .exe files. It installs/updates dependencies from requirements.txt (which includes grandalf, so ccallseq.exe's --drawio option works out of the box), checks that Tesseract-OCR has been extracted (required by screenreader.exe at runtime, see above), builds each script with PyInstaller, and moves the resulting executables into the repo root.

Run make (requires a MinGW-w64 gcc on PATH) to build every .c file in the repo into a matching .exe, e.g. serialUdpTx.c → serialUdpTx.exe. See Makefile.

Automated build (GitHub Actions)

.github/workflows/release.yml builds an .exe for every .pyw file, imagecompare.py, ccallseq.py, and every .c file in the repo on a Windows runner (the C build uses MinGW-w64/make via msys2/setup-msys2):

• Every push to main — builds and uploads the executables as a workflow artifact, so every build is validated and downloadable.

• Pushing a tag matching v* — builds and additionally attaches the executables to a GitHub Release:

  git tag v1.0.0
  git push origin v1.0.0
  

• Manual run from the Actions tab (workflow_dispatch) — builds and uploads the artifact without creating a release.