Tux Droid
Introduction
_The_ gadget any linux geek should have ;-)
Moreover it is designed in Belgium, tadaam!
Having kids can help justifying such a, hum, impulsive buy ;-)
http://www2.tux-is-alive.com/mediawiki/images/thumb/b/b9/Tux-proto.jpg/200px-Tux-proto.jpg
Sites
- Keep Your Sense Of Humor Commercial site
- Tux is alive! Community site (recent changes)
- Tux Droid development wiki
- Logs of the IRC channel #tuxdroid on irc.freenode.net
- Blogs aggregated flatted or summarized
- Forum
- Mailing lists
- tux-droid-user
- tux-droid-svn
- tux@kysoh.com was the old one(?)
- Subversion server
- Bugreports
- Atmel
Audio
- Plugging everything for the first time, and I got immediately a new Alsa device:
cat /proc/asound/cards ... 2 [default ]: USB-Audio - TUX RF DONGLE C2ME BELGIUM TUX RF DONGLE at usb-0000:00:1d.2-1, full speed
And I can already place an Ekiga test call :-)
Note that echo between internal speaker and microphone is very important so echo tests are quite terrible!
Using the OSS emulation, I can play whatever I want:
mpg321 -o oss -a /dev/dsp2 /path/to/some/mp3 mplayer -ao oss:/dev/dsp2 http://www.paul.sladen.org/pronunciation/torvalds-says-linux.mp3
Or using the native alsa layer:
mplayer -ao alsa:device=plughw=2.0 http://www.paul.sladen.org/pronunciation/torvalds-says-linux.mp3
Or using esound:
esd -d plughw:2,0 mplayer -ao esd http://www.paul.sladen.org/pronunciation/torvalds-says-linux.mp3
XMMS:
- Select alsa output plugin -> configure -> type "plughw:1,0" manually and select software volume control.
- Select OSS output plugin -> configure -> USB but then no volume control is possible.
- Select esound output plugin and launch esd as shown above
Reflashing
Then I learn that to run the new (alpha2) tuxdaemon I'll also need to flash the stuffed pinguin.
Instructions are given on the web site and are not... straightforward.
Additional notes:
- Be sure to have installed properly libusb and to have mounted /proc/bus/usb, cf /usr/share/doc/libusb-0.1-4
- For users to have the right to access usbfs, change /etc/udev/rules.d/020_permissions.rules and add GROUP=usb:
SUBSYSTEM=="usb_device", MODE="0664", GROUP="usb"
- Recompile dfu-programmer from sources! I first tried alien on the rpm but there were glibc problems and when trying tuxup fuxusb.hex I got the following "common problem" but here it's really not because of permission problems.
Programming fuxusb.hex in USB CPU Tux not found on USB
- They explain about tuxup fuxrf.hex and tuxup --main . but I had also to fix the tux rf counterpart: tuxup tuxrf.hex
- At the end, replug the dongle and restart the tux
Compiling a firmware
apt-get install gcc-avr avr-libc gdb-avr
Follow the howto starting from SVNWCRev section.
To get the proper header files to compile SVNCRev:
apt-get install libsvn-dev
And edit svncrev-0.1/config.mk to fix the following path:
APR_INCLUDE=/usr/include/apr-1.0
Personalizing the firmware
For basic stuff, we'll only change the tuxcore.eep file where are stored the basic standalone behaviors.
Edit common/config.h based on commands listed in common/commands.h
Each line is one first byte (what for?) then a frame of 4 bytes to combine between 1 and 4 commands as explained in commands.h
My first personalized firmware has the following behavior:
Eyes closed when no rf link and opened when rf link is established.
Note that it would be easier if there was a CLOSE_EYES_CMD
I solved it by using the seq "OPEN_EYES_CMD, BLINK_EYES_CMD, 1, 0"
Remote Control
(from the forum)
Press 'ALT' then 'Tux and phone' and you're in test mode.
The arrows should move tux, if you press a digit key, you change the number of movements. So 4 then up will move the eyes 4 times (2 blinks: close - open -close - open)
Read firmware/tuxcore/trunk/standalone.c l262 to see all possiblities
Raw commands
gtdi allows to send raw commands, see /firmware/tuxdefs/commands.h
Misc Tips
- First time, don't forget to plug Tux to the power adaptor for a while (~5h)
- Want to get Acapela Telecom? It's actually available as the tts-daemon
Misc Problems
- tuxdaemon from svn eats all CPU when running daemonised :-(
- tuxttsdaemon launched by gtdi eated 100% cpu after a while with tux off
- gtdi
- source to be modified: add a space between gnome-terminal -e and "the_commands"
- should check for the presence of gnome--terminal or fallback to xterm
- tuxttsdaemon button desync
- wrong comments in commands.h 0x1A & 0x1B control both leds
- we should have save/restore raw commands for led & position
Misc Questions
- How to control the volume by software?
- How tuxes see each other? They ping constantly through IR (from the right eye) as it can be seen through a webcam.
- How a dongle and a tux are paired? What if many tuxes are present simultaneously?
Misc
- Voice recognition
- Here is a project to help open source developers make their project work better by submitting your speech samples to add them to a speech corpus used to train 4 open source projects that work on that task: http://www.voxforge.org/home
- Here is the wiki page about speech recognition on the official's Tux droid development wiki: http://wiki.tuxisalive.com/index.php/Speech_recognition
Python
Examples
I don't know python so for those who don't know it neither, here's a small snippet to start with (from Fosdem presentation):
#!/usr/bin/python
import sys
sys.path.append('/opt/tuxdroid/api/python')
from tux import *
tux.tts.select_voice(3,150)
tux.cmd.leds_blink(200,10)
tux.cmd.mouth_on_free(22)
tux.tts.speak("The box said: 'Requires Windows 95 or better', so I installed LINUX")
tux.cmd.eyes_on_free(4)
tux.cmd.wings_on_free(4)
tux.tts.speak("ha ha ha")
if tux.event.wait_head_bt_pushed(60):
tux.tts.speak("Ouch! That hurts!")
Problem: sometimes there is a delay before the speech and then movements/speech get desync.
It could be nice to get events from tts daemon when starting and stopping the speech.
To launch gtdi from /usr/local/bin/gtdi I wrote a little bash script:
#!/bin/bash
cd /opt/tuxdroid/lib/gtdi
./gtdi.py
To get an interactive python shell I wrote this script /usr/local/bin/tuxsh:
#!/bin/bash
python -i -c "import sys;sys.path.append('/opt/tuxdroid/api/python');from tux import *"
You can run it interactively or piping some commands:
echo 'tux.cmd.mouth_open()'|./tuxsh
Python API
List of functions can be generated by
gawk '/^class/{match($0,/class +TUX(.*)\(object\):/,a); if(a[1]=="TCPCommunicator")c=""; else c=tolower(a[1])"."} /^ +def/ && !/__init__/{$0=gensub(/^ +def (.*)self,?(.*):/,"tux." c "\\1\\2",1);print}'\ /opt/tuxdroid/api/python/tuxapi_class.py
Or much cleaner:
tux.misc.build_documentation('/tmp/tuxapi.html') tux.misc.doc(tux) tux.misc.doc(tux.hw) ...
Try also help(tux.cmd)
IR
- http://www2.tux-is-alive.com/wiki/Freaks_Asking_Questions#How_to_get_an_IR_RC5_code_from_the_API.3F
- Looks like some of the keys of my remote are RC5 and some not... I'll try with lirc-audio hw to capture raw streams and analysing them.