Experimental Successes

Got around to play with some soft & hardware experiments, the ones I blogged about earlier:

1) Flashing my WRT54G LinkSys router:

I received my new power adapter some weeks ago and succeeded in flashing my router with DD-WRT firmware. First attempt with latest DD-WRT release didn't work, a second attempt with a lower version did the trick.
It froze on me after flashing. At first I thought it bricked (leds kept blinking), but resetting it somehow fixed it.
Updating to the latest version was painless.

2) QNAP NAS Squeezecenter:

4 words: fast simple audio streaming. Tested it with PC player and Mac player, fooled around with some Android remote controls (Squeezer and Sqeezecontrol) that worked as advertised.
I also was pleasantly surprised that you could select online radio stations by location; Studio Brussels and some other Belgian radio stations were all listed.

QNAP & opensource MP3 streaming

Allow me to introduce my next hobby project:

For the moment this seems to be the easiest solution, since we already have a QNAP TS-439 NAS hooked up in our network.

What our QNAP currently does:

• Hosts 2TB of storage
• Hosts all our media (pictures, movies, music, documents)
• Shares a USB printer over the network
• UPnP connection to PS3 (for our movie viewing pleasure)
• iTunes Server

We also rigged our new house with speaker wires and cat5e cables for a future multisource/multiroom solution (NuVo Essentia). A Squeezebox can be hooked up as a source if needed. It comes with a wireless remote, LCD included, to select songs and playlists.

Another good thing is that the Logitech Squeezecenter (formerly known as SlimServer) is opensource. There are opensource clients available for nearly all platforms, check out SoftSqueeze for example, their site lists other clients as well.

I also found some Java code that demonstrates how to connect to the music server. Maybe my next Android project? ;-)

Anyone want to share other solutions?

Qbus Remote v0.2

Alright.. this little Android project is coming along better then expected.

The latest version is able to refresh the controls from the Qbus Ethernet Control Table (or whatever it's called). It parses the response (and I must add that the stuff that is returned is very awkward) and builds the control list.

I also added a Settings screen where you should enter the ETH01 controller's address and port.

It just works!

The QBus Remote application works! 

I just switched our wall lights on and off from the Android emulator.

Now I have to clean it up (can't believe how rusty my java skills are, it's been a while), include the code to parse the controls from the ETH01 control panel so you can always refresh to get the latest configuration.

To optimize it I'll have to persist the control configuration in a DB, and include the possibility to add some categories ("light", "curtains", etc) so that the controls can be grouped if needed.

Started development of my first Android app. It's a remote control for our QBus home automation solution.

This is what it looks like so far: