Messages

31

Users / Re: Android Touch Orbiter

« on: April 06, 2011, 12:37:44 am »

The problem is inherit with every proxy_orbiter 2.0 device I have used. iPod Touch, Android and Web Browser. There seem to be a condition where ANYNEWS does not return correct information.

Yeah I had a quick look at this issue as well last night. It seems that the image returned has not been updated yet and it also does not flag anynews properly - suggesting that it is a proxy_orbiter device problem and not the touch orbiter (any variant). When I get a moment might look to see if there is anything obvious that can be done in the proxy orbiter.

Also done a couple of updates to the Android Orbiter. Just need to do a few more tests tonight and should have a new version....

32

Users / Re: Android Touch Orbiter

« on: April 05, 2011, 03:55:15 pm »

Sorry for the delay http://pastebin.com/mwTJ63cT

Not much to go on in there...

Do you have live wallpaper? If so, could you disable it and see if the problem persists or not.

Thanks
Darren

33

Developers / Re: New Touch Orbiter & Proxy_Orbiter in development

« on: April 05, 2011, 01:24:16 am »

@darrenmason, I'd like to collaborate with you on the android orbiter if possible. I've been working on some android apps for a while now, and would love to get down and dirty making it work.

Sure, see this thread for the ramblings on the current one http://forum.linuxmce.org/index.php?topic=10811.90

The code is all available on http://svn.charonmedia.org/trac.cgi/browser/people/darrenmason/AndroidTouchOrbiter which I plan to use as a base. As you will see it is quite basic but the general design will still work with XML from the server as well - it will just need to map the elements received to more Android UI objects, rather than just the ImageView. As soon as we know what elemnts are being passed then it can be done.

regards
Darren

34

Developers / Re: New Touch Orbiter & Proxy_Orbiter in development

« on: April 01, 2011, 02:22:35 am »

Hi Andrew,

Sounds interesting. As soon as you have any of the design aspects drafted please share - particularly the XML interface design and schemas.
It will enable investigation into mapping the items into the native UI capabilities. Hopefully then we can have an Android implementation earlier rather than later.

I am interested in how you see this enabling the new UI widgets and elements though? Using a proxy design won't we still be tied to the HAD Designer and DB stored screen designs? This seems to be just a new rendering for the existing orbiter right? So that instead of rendering each designer object with say SDL code (which then gets captured to an image by the proxy orbiter) you will render to data structures allowing remote systems to do the native rendering (at runtime rather than design time)
Does that match what you are thinking?
If so then aren't we still tied to the screens and design objects in HAD Designer and our Database - all be it with remote native rendering? Hopefully I am missing something but how then will this enable WYSIWYG editors and the like?

For example the XML would still be describing screens and their layouts rather than data constructs that need to be displayed.
<screen width="xxx" height="yyy"><button xpos="xx" ypos="yy"/><button xpos="xx" ypos="yy"/><list><row><column>DDD</column></row></list></screen> Rather than
<medialist type="audio"><mediaitem name="xxx" artist="yyy" path="nnn"/><mediaitem name="xxx" artist="yyy" path="nnn"/></medialist>
So you would still be tied to buttons in certain spots and lists of data already constrained for a particular screen etc.
So how do you do the screen design with a WYSIWYG editor?

Don't get me wrong - certainly not trying to be negative. Just want to get better understanding so I can start to design an Android version and to create some healthy discussion.

I still think that this is moving forward and will create more flexibility in the proxy-orbiters and somewaht more native looking ones.

regards
Darren

35

Users / Re: Android Touch Orbiter

« on: March 30, 2011, 04:33:42 am »

Hi Matt,

If you go back through this thread there is details on ways to get the logcat from the device.

Ideally, restart your phone, start the app, rotate (for the crash) and then send me the log at that point.

When the phone is rotated it re-initialises the whole app effectively - probably a bit overkill but it seemed to work more reliably than not.

Might explain why you are getting crashes on startup sometimes.

The log should give me enough to fix it...

btw; Started looking at the feedback stuff - just trying to find a little bit of time to do the coding.

regards
Darren

36

Users / Re: Android Touch Orbiter

« on: March 21, 2011, 12:27:59 am »

Hi,

A couple of requests now for the feedback on touch. Shouldn't be too hard so will try and look at it this week.

I think there was a couple of other requests that I will look at as well.

wrt. floorplans; what exactly isn't working? The display of floorplans? Just the motion sensor being triggered?

Basically - all touch orbiters are just standard orbiters that run on the core and render to an image file (rather than native libraries). So all orbiter functionality should work AFAIK.

Regards
Darren

37

Users / Re: Two Android Orbiters - pros and cons ?

« on: March 21, 2011, 12:17:27 am »

Hi,

At the end of the day the actual TouchOrbiter part of it is extremely similar. I built a basic version modelled on a standard touchorbiter (ie: Display the image from the server and send back touch events). The main aim was to get something working realiably and for it to be functional. I have what is quite a relative primitive Android phone comapred to what is now available (HTC Tattoo) so I built it for that and figured it would therefore work fine on all other platforms. It is built with android 1.5 libraries so should work on any device.

los93sol and I have discussed a few aspects and I have looked at both sets of code. There is little value in merging them at the moment and Adam was concentrating more on streamlining the user setup experience. So he has spent a lot of effort in wizards and server side setup so that it is easier for users to setup. Whereas I have assumed that you setup the server side yourself (by adding a weborbiter) and just point the software at that setup.

There has been a couple of requests for some small enhancements to the code and I will look at doing those shortly but in the meantime the code should be working and once you are setup it should be reliable.

I am not sure what state los93sol's code is in but hopefully it will get polished up and working as it was looking good, but I know he had other things on as well.

If you cannot get my one working, let me know as I will fix it but as it currently stands it should work fine.

Regards
Darren

38

Users / Re: Sound problems.

« on: March 20, 2011, 11:54:00 pm »

I had a few problems getting my HDMI sound working on my ASUS S1-AT5NM10E that I bought recently.
The problem seemed to be based around the sub-device being used by HDMI was not the default and the easiest way to get it working with LMCE was to use a probe-mask so that effectively I only had one sound device on the system.
Can you get sound doing
speaker-test c2 -D plughw:0,7
aplay -Dplughw:0,7 <some audio file>

With any of the devices? (ie: substitute the 7 for 3,8,9)

Enter the result of aplay -l and aplay -L

If you can get sound to work explicitly as above then you will be able to use a similar solution to mine.

ps: disable you onboard sound in the BIOS as well.

Regards
Darren

39

Users / Re: Android Touch Orbiter

« on: March 14, 2011, 03:14:26 am »

http://svn.linuxmce.org/svn/people/darrenmason/AndroidTouchOrbiter/bin/AndroidTouchOrbiter.apk should work I think.

Also, didn't realise that this thread had a few updates - will try and do a few of the suggestions and build another version as soon as I can

Regards
Darren

40

Users / Re: Core as touch screen central control...

« on: February 23, 2011, 11:05:21 pm »

Why not get $89 Android tablets and use those?

41

Developers / Re: Pool and Spa

« on: January 27, 2011, 12:05:09 am »

No, no waterproof controller - just use phone and/or webdt

42

Developers / Re: Pool and Spa

« on: January 18, 2011, 03:02:13 am »

Hi,

I have a popup Tv in my spa that has its own MediaDirector.
The MD is a small form PC (Atom based) that is located inside the spa enclosure. It also has a 12V audio amplifier (like you have in cars) that drives the spa speakers. This is setup as an LMCE deviceand is turned on/off by a relay controlled through the LPT port on the MD.
It is setup that whenever there is media playing it turns the AMP on and when the media stops it turns it off.

This is probably not what you are referring to but like Thom said if there is a defined interface and protocol it should not be hard to integrate with it.

Regards
Darren

43

Developers / Re: Los93soL Android Touch Orbiter

« on: December 24, 2010, 03:10:52 am »

I'm just wondering if this will work with any android tablet or if there is anything specific I should look out for.  Cheap 7-10" android tablets, the 'aPad', 'ePad', and 'gPad' , all seem to be readily available locally but each has slightly different specs.  Is it even worth considering one of these as a cheap android orbiter?

Absolutely- The touchOrbiter (any version) is very lightweight in terms of the demands on the system it is running on. All the processing work is done on the server. The main app itself just requests a bitmap version of the orbiter screen that is rendered on the server and sends back the co-ordinates of any touch events that occurr.
Adam has built in some additional smarts that allow setup to be as painless as possible.

As long as the tablet can connect to your linuxMCE server it should be suitable - so therefore the cheaper the better really. Especially if this is all you will use it for.
Keep in mind that some of the cheaper ones are just slow in general - but that is not related to the orbiter.

Regards
Darren

44

Users / Re: Android Touch Orbiter

« on: December 22, 2010, 12:18:11 am »

Carlos,

I see. Every touch does an image refresh so the behaviour should be similar for any touch orbiter. Will have a look when I can and see what can be done to make it better.

What is your network connection like for other things - pretty quick?

It might just be a product of slow device/wireless network/large images.....

Will update when I know more.

regards
Darren

45

Installation issues / Re: Weird sound issue

« on: December 20, 2010, 12:46:34 am »

This has been progressively driving me nuts for the last few weeks and has had me do several rebuilds of the MD and a full system reinstall.

Additionally, I have put in a seperate sound card...


I then realised that something else must be happening so I plugged headphones in the line out and the sound was fine (in both the console and the main X screen)

This led me to the sound cable or the TV - both of which where previously working on the old installation.

Then it occurred to me that I had put a new video card in (so I can use vdapau). Given that it seemed to work fine straight away - hadn't given it a second thought. I was wrong.

The setup is a DVI->HDMI cable to the TV and an Analog cable for the sound (3.5mm -> 3.5mm). The input jack on the TV states the 3.5mm jack is for audio associated with DVI/VGA signals.
It seems that the new video card sends something in its signal such that the TV decides to not use the external sound - but it is only when the graphical display is visible (ie: the console is fine).

So the MD sound was fine all along - it was the TV choosing to ignore it based on the video signal.

The next question then ..... WHY? Can anyone help with what is actually happening and perhaps if there is a setting in the video driver and / or xorg.conf to stop the current behaviour.

Took the video card (and the additional sound card) out of the machine for now but would like to use it if possible.

Regards
Darren