Time sure is flying.  Sometime in spring I made tentative plans to see “The Expendables” with a friend in August.  At the time I thought that the date – August 13th – was soooo far away.

Ya, right.

I’m not here to bemoan the rapid passing of Time though; I’ll leave that for another entry – which may or may not ever get written btw.  No, I’m here to continue the chronicle that is my Whole Home Automation journey.

Now, I can’t say that the scope of the project has changed.  It’s still limited to audio and surveillance.  On the surveillance side there’s not much to report; occupant detection is working, and although I haven’t hacked any USB Bluetooth dongles I can also say that the system is working acceptably as-is so I’m in no rush to change things.

On the audio front it’s been a case of small updates and bugfixes here and there.  One of the bigger useability updates has been to allow the download of a .zip file of select tracks.  This makes it easy to download a selection of tracks to a local device, or download an entire album to Shelly’s phone.  It’s not something that I’ll use often, but it’s nice to have.

Something that should be more useful for me, however, is a project I just completed that’s physically removed from the system at home – but interacts with it nonetheless.  I’m talking about playback of streaming zones, and in particular, playback of streaming zones using _my_ Windows Mobile smartphone.

Here’s the scenario.  I’ve got some tracks queued on a streaming zone.  I hop in the car, connect to home, and start playing that zone through my phone (and obviously through the car stereo).  Then I hit a joint that’s bangin’ – or lame – and I want to repeat that joint or skip it altogether.

Traditionally this has been possible, but it meant having a browser open on the phone and connected to the zone page for the streaming zone in question.  You press a transport control on the webpage, and some seconds later (up to 15 seconds in some cases) the streaming buffer gets around to reflecting the changes.

“Wouldn’t it better”, I wondered, “if you could use the player’s transport controls to control the zone directly?!?”

Yes, it would.  And so now it is.

I toyed with the idea of writing an app from scratch.  And while this is something I may still do, the opening lines of this entry are quite clear in this respect: Time is at a premium.  Sometimes you have to settle with something that works rather than something that’s perfect.  It’s not a mantra that I usually adopt, but in some cases – as with the Bluetooth dongle – it’s acceptable.

So as it turns out, GSPlayer is open-source.  It’s a player I’ve used in the past, and I think that I passed it over in favour of PocketMusic because the latter is purtier and has bigger buttons.  But if the buttons aren’t useful, then who cares?  That, and PocketMusic has some stability issues – to the tune of often requiring a soft-reset of the entire phone.

Anyhow, I modified GSPlayer and captured transport control events so that it will send RPC commands to the backend server.  So if I press the “next track” button in GSPlayer, it will tell the backend to move to the next track.  It will also disconnect/reconnect the stream to make sure the streaming buffer is cleared.

And of course, it only does all of this if a stream is active *and* that stream appears to be connected to my server.

So ya, that’s that.  I did a quick test on my phone and it seems to work.  I’m off to run a few errands shortly and I’ll do the trial-by-fire at that point.