Monday, February 16, 2015

Swipe Card Jukebox

I think I've finally come up with a decent name for one of the projects I've tinkered with for a long time now. Previous I'd referred to it as RFID Music, but that doesn't help explain it to anyone who isn't a geek. Even if you know what RFID is then the you may be left pondering if you're swiping cards to actually make music.... a card for each note?

Swipe Card Jukebox does a better job.

I won't be renaming the github repo which is home to the underlying code, since I just see that mplayer-web-rfid-control is a fair explanation of what is going on under the covers.

I have been able to get my Swipe Card Jukebox set up as a stand alone system (which no longer relies on XBMC / Kodi). I'm able to trigger playback of music via either swiping an RFID card or via the system's website. My next bit of work will be in converting the old flat file database of card associations over to the new SQLite based database, as I don't really want to have to go through the steps of manually assigning the cards from scratch again.

Thursday, February 12, 2015

R-Pi 2 Media Player

My Raspberry Pi 2 model B arrived and I've got OSMC Alpha 4 installed on a micro SD card. I was very impressed by the installation process, their installer is very slick. I didn't have any time to tinker with anything beyond getting it booted for the first time.

Here's my todo list:

  • switch to the default kodi skin; confluence (eases the change from XBian to OSMC)
  • I couldn't connect via ssh when I tried, I suspect the wifi device hasn't been detected
  • get the remote control working
  • plug the external drives which contain all our media into it
  • export the library from the old XBian setup (including watched status)
  • import library into OSMC setup
  • install and configure transmission
  • install and configure sickbeard
  • install and configure samba, so I can access the media files from my PC

    Once I've switched us over to using this new OSMC system on the R-Pi 2 I can redeploy the old R-Pi as the base of my refactored RFID music triggering system. I've got a pair of speakers, another wifi dongle and external drive all ready to get that up and running. More on that as I get to it.

  • Friday, February 6, 2015

    Raspberry Pi 2

    I've placed an order for a Raspberry Pi 2. Alas I didn't get in quick enough when they were first announced and I'm now waiting on a back order being filled. It'll probably arrive in my hot little hands in 2 to 3 weeks. The wait isn't going to kill me, due to what I'm planning on using it for.

    I'll be using it to replace the current first gen R-Pi I've been using as a media player, running XBian. I've been pretty happy with the performance of it; as I was able to use xbmc, sickbeard and transmission on it and have 3 external USB drives connected via USB hub. But lately we've noticed that it can get a little slow to respond and update the file listings in menus.

    I'm looking towards switching the system over to use OSMC rather than XBian, they already have a build specifically for the R-Pi 2 and I like the approach they're taking. I suspect it'll be nice and speedy.

    This will then free up the old R-Pi to take on the work of being the guts of my revamped RFID Music setup.