0.28.0 - reading the screen as text, and watching it while you are away
Until now, getting a serial number or an error code off a BIOS screen meant reading it and typing it out somewhere else. Press Select and sweep the mouse over the picture as if it were a page, or press Copy and take the whole screen. A UEFI boot menu, memtest, a Linux console: all of them come back as text.
There is a short silent clip of it happening: a NixOS boot menu, its lines being selected with the mouse while the menu is walked up and down at the same time - which is the part that proves this is the live screen and not a screenshot somebody pasted.
Watch it on YouTube - no sound, nothing installed on the target, and the machine has not booted yet.
It is not OCR, and that is the point. A text screen is drawn by a character generator: a fixed grid, one fixed bitmap per character. So each cell is simply looked up in a table of the shapes the font has. Either a cell matches and the character is certain, or it comes back as a question mark and you can see exactly which cells were not read. There is no "recognised, probably" to catch you out three days later.
Three fonts are known: the one a legacy BIOS draws with, the one a Linux console draws with (a different font - five printable characters differ, including f and v) and the one a UEFI console draws with.
The device can watch the screen when nobody is. Give it a phrase or two - no boot device, kernel panic - and with the console closed it reads the screen once a second and raises an alert the moment one appears, clearing it when it goes. Both edges go in the log, and Home Assistant gets a sensor with the matched text. It is off by default, and while it is off it costs nothing.
Also here: EDID profiles that cap the target at 720p or 1024x768, which on older silicon is the difference between 7 frames a second and something you can work in; the Pins tab now draws the board's expansion header the way it is printed rather than a list of GPIO numbers; and paste learned Czech, Ukrainian and Lithuanian.