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April 12, 2006

Roku SoundBridge Action Shots

Roku SoundBridge. M2000

A while ago I mentioned purchasing the Roku Soundbridge, a remote wireless MP3 player that uses either a slim server or DAAP server for acessing MP3's via WiFI or Ethernet.

I ended up purchasing a few (4 to be exact), but not as Music players, but as remote alert console ticker displays. Don't get me wrong, The remote music interface is great. But I didn't really need it.

What I needed was some way to flash a message when an event occurs. As cool as it is to have a speech synthesizer speak your email or alerts, it still doesn't suffice if you're busy or are not close enough to hear it.

Enter the soundbridge.

So I purchased a few of these with a new intention in mind. The manufacture opened the interface enough to allow remote control via socket programming or telnet interface.

So maybe you've been wondering where I've been, why no entries.. Well..
It's been alot of studying and alot of programming to create a C socket application to function as a shell script interpreter to control this puppy.
I tied it in with Festival and SpeechD so when the computer talks, the 3 SB's in my home all light up with the message. The one in the bedroom kicks out of standby lights up then shuts off.
It's working pretty well now and it's cool to hear the computer alert me then see the three units display the message like a ticker.
So Finally.... I'm ready to show action shots to everyone I've been touting this to.

I've now rigged my work environment to foward alerts into this environment also. So now no matter where I'm at I have a bird's eye view of everything I'm responsible for.

In the meantime as I'm learning a bit about RSS, I wrote a NAGIOS logger to create An RSS feed of alerts.
This now enables me to have a birdseye alert view from Larry's new emwebmail interface or My Yahoo page.
If any one is interested, I can post the code and create a new projects folder.

Soon to come is an interface to gather RSS feeds and spit them out on the SoundBridge.
Although I'll probably work on a Driver for LCDPROC or LCD4LINUX
and use that environment instead.
In the long run I think that would prove to be more flexible and allow the greatest growth/use.

Also the cost of a SoundBridge M1000 is not much more then a Crystal Fontz and it gives you a music player too!

Sound Bridge Action Shot Gallery

My Desk at work.

And a Close Up.

See the Extended Entry for other pictures.

Posted by Me on April 12, 2006 10:15 AM

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