Day one on a new project – with Kaffe Matthews, and a collaboration between FoAM & Timelab, “The Swamp that was” is an opera where bicycles become a way to hear stories of the past in the city of Ghent.
I’m picking up the software side of things from Wolfgang Hauptfleisch, which involves using BeagleBoards – low power self contained open hardware ARM computers, a good follow up to my experiments with the considerably more closed NDS and less general purpose Android.
This is my test BeagleBoard xM in a custom laser cut housing from Timelab.
The “swamp” system is based on lua scripts calling proteaAudio for realtime audio processing. Lua has a tiny footprint and is great as an embedded interpreter (despite indexing from 1 and other minor gripes). Everything seems to be up and running, and I’ve set up a project on gitorious with the sourcecode.
Some random things I’ve learned include: flags to speed up dd copying images to extremely slow usb SD memory cards:
sudo dd if=swamp0-1.img of=/dev/sde oflag=dsync bs=1M count=1024
List ip addresses of devices attached to your local router:
sudo arp-scan --interface=wlan0 192.168.1.0/24
I’m using the Ã…ngström distribution on the beagle board, which uses opkg for package management – it took me a long time to figure out the best way to search for packages is simply:
opkg list | grep alsa
