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Dell Rio/Sonic blue support - xAP your Rio.


  • Subject: Dell Rio/Sonic blue support - xAP your Rio.
  • From: Patrick Lidstone \(Personal E-mail\)
  • Date: Sun, 21 Mar 2004 19:10:00 +0000

Primarily motivated by my obsession with muting music when I get an
incoming call on the asterisk phone switch, I finally got round to
dusting off the Dell Rio's this weekend and setting up the development
environment. xAP enabling has given them a new lease of life! The first
cut of the results can be had from:

<a href="http://patrick.lidstone.net/xapbin/my.arf";>http://patrick.lidstone.net/xapbin/my.arf</a>

To install:

- Download my.arf
- Locate either receiver.arf or mercury.arf within your Dell RIO or
jreceiver server set up
- Copy the receiver.arf/mercury.arf to some where safe so you can
recover later if need be
- Stop the Dell server software
- Put my.arf in its place, renaming it to receiver.arf/mercury.arf
- Restart the Dell server software
- Reboot the RIOs by pulling the power plug out, waiting 10s and then
plugging them back in.

If all goes well you should see the Rioplay splash screen. You rio has
now been xAPped! :-) My dell server software is certainly a bit
temperamental, it can take a couple of go's for it to pull the image
down correctly.

What you get:

* Simple web gui, with transport controls, music player status info, xap
config data and event log. Go to the web page to set the UID and
instance name.

* Support for Whole House Audio transport and audio control/events via
xAP - this is pretty much complete I think. These schema documented on
xapautomation.org and xapframework.org websites.

* Support for variable duration on-screen display (5 lines x 35 odd
characters!)

* Support for infra-red "drop through" - if you press a key which
isn't
consumed locally, it's broadcast as an IR event.

* No support for playlists yet, I'll tackle that next.

Still to come:

* Integration of a decision engine.
* Notification icons in response to xAP messages.

Known issues:
* There seems to be a software issue with turning the units off/putting
the units in standby(!)
* Line-out volume is fixed (it doesn't track the volume control, in the
same way off-the-shelf rios didn't. I will look into this, but technical
info is scant.)
* Not all browsers render the webpages correctly.
* Pause doesn't work (this is a feature of the original Rioplay code,
and I'll fix it in due course).

Bug reports and feature requests gratefully received.

Patrick






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