responses to personalsoundtrack

a couple of sites have posted some thoughts on about personalsoundtrack:

ubergizmo

tech digest

shiny shiny

generation-nt (french)

bluetooth is up and running

bluetooth is up and running. i had stripped the filesystem that was stored on the flash memory to almost nothing, so that it would be VERY quickly. pivot-root'ing is very very fast, so the bottleneck is reading the initial filesystem off the flash ram (jffs2 woes).

anyway, turns out the bluetooth has to be enabled in flash filesystem in order for it to be loaded properly. my guess is, i could strip it out of the flash filesystem, and simply have a startup script that runs after pivot-rooting... in fact, maybe i'll do that.

ok so the point is, bluetooth is working!

next goal: offload accelerometer processing and logic onto a pic 16f648a and a PWM accelerometer. i'm a noob when it comes to pic chips, and i'll be writing in assembly (boo). i think i've got the serial code down, i'm going to try to head over to ACE tomorrow and test it out on the pic chip.

version 3 gumstix is up and running

spent a lot of time just trying to install a usable linux system. i only allotted 4gigs of space to the linux partition on my macbook, and apparently ubuntu doesn't have any kind of "minimal" install (the server one doesn't play nice with a triple boot machine), and i didn't have enough room to do the gumstix filesystem compiling.

so, i used parallels and spent a long time setting THAT up. finally got everything working and did the following:

- built filesystem for flash on gumstix, minimal boots pretty quickly (15secs)

- built filesystem for mmc card on gumstix including python, gcc, all libraries i need, and my custom-built python modules

- configured the gumstix and mmc filesystem for pivot-root booting

- planned out where personalsoundtrack code files will go and where music will go

- configured sound card stuff

- copied personalsoundtrack code from version 2 onto the mmc card

- got personalsoundtrack running on the version 3 setup!

so on the mmc card i have the filesystem image which is pivot-root'd after boot. then, i have all mp3's and personalsoundtrack code just sitting on the mmc card, and run it directly. that way, for synchronizing code or big edits, i don't have to work on the gumstix. i can just pop the mmc card into my macbook, edit all the personalsoundtrack code, put mmc card back into the gumstix, reboot it and in 15 secs i'm back to testing.

cool!

here's the setup: the serial board is the one with the grey cord coming out of it. that is only in place for development and is removed for the final product.

new boards arrived!

just received the two main boards for the upcoming "pocket-sized" 3rd version. gumstix basix motherboard w/ bluetooth and the audio board. my mmc card came today as well, but i missed the delivery. i'll pick that up tomorrow.

i've posted some pictures of the boards next to my ipod nano.

tomorrow's plans:
- initialize the damn thing
- get the boot image working
- try to get it up and running using code from personalsoundtrack v2.

site will be down oct 18

my site will be down at 1pm on oct 23 for maintenance. should be up later that day.

personalsoundtrack on digg!

cool.

more info about personalsoundtrack

if you want to read more about the project, the motivations behind it, and find some links to shows, check out:

http://ace.uci.edu/~gelliott/personalsoundtrack

The beginning

this blog will serve as a development blog for my project, PersonalSoundtrack. It is open-source, and geared toward being easy enough for pretty much anyone to build. in this blog, i'll keep track of what i'm doing, and how i'm doing it.

i'm using the gumstix platform.




description of project:

"PersonalSoundtrack, a tiny wearable computer, detects your walking or running speed and plays songs from your music library that match your pace. Song speed is adjusted in real-time to match subtle variations in your gait, while larger, deliberate pace changes cause the device to change songs. You simply put it on and begin moving; that's it.

Most computational devices require the user to adapt to the machine. PersonalSoundtrack offers, instead, a symbiotic relationship: both human and machine actively adapt to each other in real-time. The 'interface' is one's natural gait. There is no optimal or pre-defined experience, encouraging meandering, wasting time, and loitering.

In April, at CHI 2006, I published a paper discussing my first prototype."