Right you are! How is your Raspberry Pi project coming along?

I played around with including the system keyboard a bit yesterday and am not really sure how it can be done reliably. As we know, some keyboards (Swype/SwiftKey) are able to send complete words rather than individual characters. This can be problematic, especially if one makes a mistake and sends 'risk' when they meant to type 'rush'. Swype will send 'risk' to the buffer and then display alternative words, like 'rush'. However, 'risk' will have already been sent down the line. A possible way around this would be to have a text field popup where one could compose a search string and then send it to the player when they were happy with it. At that point, I'm not sure if it would be faster than using the old method. But I'm going to code it up and see how it behaves.

Happy weekend to all.

Yeah, you make good points on the keyboard thing -- perhaps it isn't worth the trouble when the empeg's fuzzy T9 input is so fast to begin with.

All of my non-work development projects stalled over the winter, including my RPi project. I did make some progress since I recorded the demo video, including showing cover art, but there's still a fair amount of work ahead to make it stable enough for daily use. In addition to work stuff and family stuff taking up a lot of time, I ran into a bit of a wall on my attempts to reverse-engineer the CAN messages to provide steering wheel button integration and/or develop some kind of custom control panel. Then it got really cold, and suddenly sitting in my garage in below freezing weather staring at hex dumps didn't seem so appealing.

The good news is that your app fits in perfectly as at least a temporary solution, if not a very nice primary interface. I'd still like to get the steering wheel controls figured out, but in the worst case, I'll have something that works pretty well. I actually thought about developing my own Android remote app at one point but (a) I don't have a lot of love for Java, and (b) my Nexus S's screen was too small to reliably use in the car. Now that I have a Nexus 4 and you've done all the hard work, it seems like it could meet my needs perfectly.

So I ordered one of those 5-in-1 USB network jobs from EBay, but mine doesn't seem to have a WDS option anywhere. It does WPS, but I don't see any options for WDS lazy, bridge, etc. I guess there are different firmware builds depending on who you get the device from, or what random firmware they came with, or whatever. As I expected with a cheap item like this, though there is a firmware upgrade function, I can't seem to find any info online about updated firmware for it.

Still a very neat and useful device, but without WDS, it won't handle my LAN connection needs.

Damn! Here is what the WDS screen looks like on mine. Does the web interface on yours look like this? This one shows version 2.1.2.1...

Yeah, my interface looks totally different.

Did you order yours from the seller you linked to? I could try ordering one from there.

I tried a few more google queries and finally hit something that looks somewhat promising, albeit with links to Chinese download pages with no English README or anything. Since these things seem to be made by a dozen different manufacturers and there seem to be multiple hardware designs, I'm hesitant flash just anything, but I'll try reading through that long-ish thread to see if there's any way to figure out the model number, or if anyone's made progress flashing OpenWRT or anything else onto one of these.

The original ebay link I posted was the one I bought. I also read a bit about them working on some more mainstream firmware (DD-WRT,tomato,etc), but nothing was available yet. Good luck!

The ebay seller is 'mambate', out of New Jersey...

I played around in the car a bit tonight and couldn't get things working. Sadly, my firmware doesn't even have any sort of client/bridge mode. It's got a ton of router functions (content filtering, port forwarding, etc.) but no option to bridge the WAN and LAN interfaces. So I'm stuck with a separate network segment and a WAN gateway, which isn't going to work out.

I could try to load OpenWRT on it, but I wasn't looking for a project within a project, and this was only going to be a temporary solution anyway until I can fully integrate my Raspberry Pi in the car, at which point I'll need a wired LAN with at least 2 ports on it for the RPi and the empeg to communicate.

So at this point, I'll probably just bite the bullet and install the WRT54G in my car again. It's going to be a clunkier install, but at least I get 4 LAN ports, and I know that client, bridge, and WDS all work.

I still think I'll get some use out of the mini router thingie, and even if all it's ever good for is a backup power source for my cell phone, it was worth the $18.

I've got a couple more feature requests for the app after finally using it in my car. (empeg in the car for the first time in 9+ months. Yay!)

1. I'd love an option for a persistent item in the notification bar, so that I can easily access the app by swiping down.

1a. It'd be awesome if the notification item displayed the current track info from /proc/empeg_notify.

1b. And it would be incredibly awesome if the notification item had a few action buttons attached to it -- perhaps the four cardinal direction buttons from the front panel would be a good choice. (I don't think apps can accept long presses of the action buttons, but even short presses would be useful for changing tracks and navigating the empeg menu.)

2. Is there some way you could detect gestures on the remote area and send those out as specific button presses? The obvious candidates are swipes in the cardinal directions corresponding to those buttons on the front panel, but I can imagine all sorts of useful ones. (Gestures like swipes are easier to do when driving than aiming for a specific button on the remote.)

Sorry for my absence! These are good ideas, Tony. I will look into incorporating them in the near future

I did some prototyping this morning.

For some reason, Android only allows a max of 3 buttons in the notification area...not sure why they did this, but I'm not very happy with it. If you were only given 3 buttons, what would you have each of them do?

The rest of the notification stuff is done

As for gesturing, it's easy enough to accomplish on its own, but cannot be combined with the pager view I already have in place (the swiping back and forth between remote and playlists) so I am not sure how it could be implemented. Perhaps a 'car mode' screen...

I've been able to build a custom notification with 4 buttons
It doesn't exactly match the look and feel of latest Android theme, but it works. I'm going to refine it a bit more and then push an update.

Cheers

Very cool!

With respect to gestures, I'd be okay with it switching behavior in car mode, but the same effect could also be achieved with a simple checkbox in the settings to disable the "swipe gestures switch between remote and playlists" behavior. You'd then either need to use some other gesture to switch pages (Android can't detect three finger swipes, can it?) or use tab anchors that can be clicked on to change pages.

Nice solution. I have implemented gestures now on the remote (configurable with a checkbox in Settings).

So now describe all of the gestures you'd like to have
I assume right, left, up, down lines to correspond to the physical buttons on the player, but since the app is now using the full-blown gesture package we can make use of more complicated shapes as well.

Cheers

Oh, wow. You are going to regret asking me for a wish list.

I guess the first question is how precise is the gesture recognition? Can it tell a one finger swipe from two or three? And how complicated are we talking about with the shapes? Is there a doc you can point me to that describes the limitations of the gesture functionality you're using?

Right off the bat, beyond swipes in cardinal directions corresponding to the physical buttons, I think it'd be awesome if it could detect the numbers 0 through 9 and send those through as number presses. Just drawing the number 2 to get "tweak artist" would be amazing, provided it's fuzzy enough to get it right most of the time.

If multi-touch gestures work, I would think maybe single finger for the physical buttons, then maybe two finger up and down for volume up and down, two finger left and right for rewind/fast-forward, etc.

lol! I can't find a nice doc that describes limitations, but we can do multi-touch for sure. One minor issue with single-finger 'up' and 'down' is that they will not work at all when the screen is setup to scroll vertically. Which it needs to be to satisfy multiple device resolutions. I have implemented the physical buttons as a straight swipe to the right or left and then a /\ shape for up and \/ for down. Your numbers idea is great as usual, with the minor issue of drawing the 1. It cannot be a simple straight vertical line (see above), but could be drawn like this:



The rest of the the numbers are easy
The nice thing about gestures in Android is that you I can build numerous different attempts at a gesture and name it the same as previous iterations which increases the fuzziness For example, I could create 10 different gestures of the number 8 to increase the app's likelihood of a match when users swipe an '8'. All of my gestures would be slightly different just by virtue of a dumb finger against a digitizer

I am not sure about vertical multi-touch limitations and there may well be none. So that would be nicely solved before it became a problem.

Tomorrow, I'm getting on a plane and flying to a foreign beach for a week so I'll be back at this at that time. Fiesta!

Cheers

Would it be possible to have it scroll only when you use multiple fingers up/down? If so, what about this:

All single finger gestures used for numbers and maybe other "complex" gestures.

Two finger swipes used for the four physical buttons.

Three finger swipe up/down to scroll, left/right to switch between remote and playlist views.

Maybe pinch zoom gestures for volume up/down?

With this, I think you could do the number 1 as a straight line, and there would be no ambiguity with up/down for scrolling.

Anyway, no matter what, this sounds awesome. Have fun at the beach

At Tony's request, I've decided to release the source for this. I've got no time to maintain it anymore.

https://github.com/suomi35/empeg-remote

Cheers!

Awesome! Thanks!

Is the Play Store version fully up to date with the github release? If so, I'll just buy the binary and save myself some fuss!

Answering my own question: Github has "1.93.72hj", Google Play says "1.86.03hj".

Okay, loaded the binary, entered IP address of a working empeg, and all I ever see is "Empeg is unreachable". What am I missing?

Firewall.. Droidwall, to be specific.

App purchased and now working fine!

Thanks

Now I need a recommendation for another Android App:

Something that works the the "Stream" function of Empeg Remote for Android.

Tried a bunch, thus far nadda.

Hey Mark,

Thanks for the support! I use ServeStream to stream stuff from Empeg. It will occasionally lose the stream, but works most of the time

Cheers

If I recall correctly, the only differences in the GPlay and Github versions have to do with gesture experimentation. tonyc and I were trying to allow a wider range of gestures (2 and 3 fingers, etc) for easier control while driving. I never got it working the way I wanted it to though.

Thanks for the app!

This really could really revitalize the empegs I have around here. No more squinting into a tiny display to navigate playlists -- just do it from the sofa or where ever!

Could be good in the car, too. I can just plug the empeg in and toss it (SSDs) onto the rear seats rather than working out a dash mount for it. I think I still have a tiny D-Link pocket router gizmo to give it wifi connectivity with -- might add a jack to export +5V power for it from the empeg first.

Cheers

Installed, works well enough, and not particularly intrusive.
Thanks for the recommendation!

Cheers
-ml

This feature is not working for me on my G510 - the display is locked into landscape - unless there is a setting somewhere?

So now I just need an easy way to access the empeg via ethernet in the car...

Tiny little "pocket wifi bridge", plugged into the empeg over a short length of cat5. Then Wifi between that and your smartphone.