The Holiday Project
My dad decided to treat him self, so he's putting together a audio server to sit next to the Hi-Fi and feed it the CD colection without any of this changing the disk rubbish.
Basically its a fan-less Mini-ITX board and a big IDE disk in a rather nice case (mini-itx.com sell them in the UK) its also got the dinkiest internal PSU I've ever seen! (if you ignore the power block you hide outside the case of course...)
So.. what we did...
- Put the thing together
- Install Debian... what else? ;)
- Marvel at how quiet the thing is
- Figure out how to drive the display and buttons...
- Grab the picoLCD SDK (includes a C library and example app)
- Play with it a bit
- Decide doing everything in C is a bit too much like hard work
- Figure out how to write a Python module
- Write a Python module (which you can find at http://projects.sucs.org/svn/LiFiPod/pyusblcd/)
- Write a really simple test program to make sure everything works.
- Figure out how to make it play music...
- Look at a few options
- Succumb to MPD propaganda from various people
- Bodge together a simple interface to play music.
- Play with it
- Make a Video - not too bad for a days work!
... - Make it do all the home server stuff the old, noisy, bogged together Pentium Pro box was doing
I've now left the implementation of a rather more elegant solution, with browsing for media and stuff to my Dad... or me when I'm next home ;)
Future Developments?...
- Actually plug it into the Hi-Fi! ;)
- Media browsing... It really needs some kinda of way to select an artist or album to play for example.
- Remote Control... its got a IR receiver, but the C library doesn't yet decode what is received, so its all a bit of a garbled mess.
[ Entry posted at: Fri 12 Jan 2007 22:43:04 UTC | 2 comment(s)... | Cat: Geeky ]
Steve writes:
Fantastic!
That really is uber mega useful!
I expect making the interface to select an artist/album will be slightly tricky with such limited character space and input methods.
I guess something like a cut down iPod menu would work, or maybe using 13 of your 20 characters on both lines you could have the alphabet and then use up/down and left/right to highlight a letter (maybe by making it upper case instead of lower). Selecting that letter then takes you to the artist/albums (depending where in the menu you got to) beggining with that letter!
Sounds like a lot of fun to play with anyway, keep us updated on its progress.
I want one :-D
[ Sat 13 Jan 2007 12:09:56 UTC ]
Pete writes:
Hmm. How did I manage to avoid contributing to the MPD propaganda?
[ Sat 13 Jan 2007 17:31:43 UTC ]