Hi there,
I received my RIO this week, and it REALLY ROCKS!!!

After doing some "research" on the net about this piece,
there are a few questions open:

- what about the ongoing software development for the Receiver?
What enhancements are planned?

- On the shipping box there is a picture of the receiver
with a "display" which i cant select on my box. Are there any
other skins, visualizations, displays,... available and how can
i get them working?

have fun
Robert
from Austria (not Australia ;-)

There are no visualisations in the released receiver software.

You can change the display mode by selecting 'Change DIsplay -> Select Layout' from the menu.

> On the shipping box there is a picture of the receiver
> with a "display" which i cant select on my box.

I think that this display was an early prototype. Not all the fonts are the same, and there's no "Spectrum Analyzer" widget. However, it is possible to create your own interface, though not all features are well supported by the standard (or 3rd party) servers.

Sometime soon I'll post a perl script to make your own display layouts, in the meantime, if you're geeky enough to write your own tools, check out http://www.dasnet.org/David/Rio/Layout.html. I've not figured out how to add bitmaps or such, but you can at least move things around, make the scope bigger, and add a little "volume wedge" display.

Inspired by David's efforts, and slightly assisted by the fact that I've got access to the source code, you can find more information here.

Too cool.

woohoo! Thanks for the update.

Looks like I was barking up the right tree for layout ID 5 -- it's a bitmap. And ID 1 (which I hadn't really played with) is a text label, which is good if we ever want to put labels or other stuff on the screen. Though the structure you present for TextWidgetData is a little confusing when compared with others -- I'll have to experiment to make sure I've got it. And I never even discovered the "style" code...

Any chance you can explain how to load a bitmap? Do I give it geometry information, or is that implied in the size of the field? Bit depth? or is that implied/fixed?

Also, are there any other tags (the TrackInfoWidgetData "which" field) that the Rio can display (looking for things like genre, etc.), or other status displays other than mute, repeat, or random?

Even if you can't answer these (for whatever reasons), thanks for the validation of (and kind words regarding) what I've put together! (and this at least frees me from having to try to load a field with IDs 10 through 255!)


david.

TextWidgetData is a little confusing

Ah, that's because I was trying to express C++-style inheritance in C structures, and forgot to do it for the others. What I mean is that the structures can be considered to be overlaid on each-other.

Which do you think is clearer? Should I just say "these structures live in the data field", and drop the header?

Any chance you can explain how to load a bitmap?

Just as soon as I get some time to figure out the code. Having the source code doesn't actually make this much easier, you know .

TrackInfoWidgetData "which" field

Yeah, I'll find out what the numbers mean.

other status displays

ditto

I stopped where I did because I had to do something else. I'll try to finish the document tomorrow. I don't think there'll be a problem with letting this out -- the original OEM spec asked for a layout editor anyway -- which is why they're stored in this form -- we (I) just didn't get around to writing one.

mumble mumble long time ago said layout editor might make it to car player mumble mumble grumble

I lied .

More information (bitmaps, etc.) now available.

> More information (bitmaps, etc.) now available.

Woohoo! Thanks. Now I just need to find the time to play with this again. Getting REAL busy lately, which is a bummer, 'cause I've got some great ideas on how to extend JReceiver to give the Rio near-Riot capabilities.

The bitmap info is certainly a lot simpler than I was afraid of, but I'm not sure I woulda puzzled into it myself. Now I just need to create some generic skin that tests 'em all out...

Thanks again!

david.