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
  • daemon
  • firmware/hardware
  • API
  • bootloader
• Atmel
  • ATmega88

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.