Originally Posted By: mlord
I think we both might agree that the Arduino is redundant: running on the empeg gives better access to more features. Eg. "Album Titles"


Totally agreed. The Arduino is in the mix right now merely because I have experience with it, it's an easy coding environment, and there is a lot of handholding with a ton of reference material on the internet, and I can iterate quickly on it.

Quote:
or possibly even browsing the empeg playlists from a cooperating head unit.


Oh wow yes. There is a detailed specification for the BlueGiga chip on how to handle that kind of thing. It's all detailed in this document and it's quite complicated, but I think it's do-able.

I know that my car head unit has a "music search" option but I think it only was implemented in iOS Apple CarPlay mode and/or Android Auto mode. I haven't looked closely to see if it's implemented in Bluetooth mode or not, but I know the chip at least supports it.

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Note to self: When working from the laptop, don't use the built-in USB-UART of the Dev board, as it suffers badly from buffer bloat and consequently loses data if I so much as sneeze. Instead, use either the built-in serial port on the laptop, or a USB-serial adapter, connecting to the RX/TX pins on the board through a MAX chip.


Interesting. The only time I ever used that port on the dev board was to use it to install the latest firmware onto the BlueGiga chip. By the way, if you encounter problems with the functionality of my code, you might want to make sure you've updated your BlueGiga chip to the latest firmware to make sure that we're all talking to the same back end code. I don't know how much has changed in the command set from version to version. Instructions for updating the firmware are in the code comments at the top of my example code.

Just realized: One other note that I foresee being a potential problem with my example code. When the host stereo queries for track titles and other metadata, it could do it in one of two possible ways:
1. Separate queries for each individual piece of metadata, i.e., one query for Title, another query for Artist, another for Genre, etc.
2. A single query for multiple combinations of the metadata, such as querying for all of them, or a subset of them, all at once with a single query statement.

I have noticed that there is support in the BlueGiga command set for both of those methods. I noticed that my Honda only ever uses the "one at a time" query method (though it does query for all of them in quick succession), so my code only knows how to answer that type of "one at a time" individual query. I have not implemented parsing and response of the second "all at once" query method, since that's more complicated code-wise and I don't have a device which performs that kind of query to test it against. Your car stereo might possibly implement that latter query type, so you might have to implement a parser and a response method for it. Keep an eye out for that.

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Tony Fabris