Wireless speaker - phase 1 completed
Posted by robert on November 11, 2007 at 04:58 PM
This has been siting on our desk for a while, but finally the time has come to roll up our sleeves and get it over with. We want to build a wireless bluetooth speaker that we can use throughout the house and that allows us to skip tracks and adjust the volume in a playful way. It is beyond me that no major or obscure electronics brand has taken it upon them to at least build a wireless speaker that controls music playback when there are various wireless headphones on the market that already do this. This is the one and only feature that makes a wireless speaker useful. So please build a low-cost, small and portable speaker with this feature, then we'll take care of the playful part... This was our personal motto for a while, but after almost 3 years of waiting we have given up.
Today we completed the first phase of this project, soldering wires to the the contact points for the tact switches on the pcb of the headphones. Bit of a suspense thriller given the size of the connections, but we managed. Now we can start to focus on the fun part, the interaction with the playback control using tilt switches, IR sensors and capacitive sensors. We have not really figured out which one it will be in the end, but we have some ideas. For the speaker part we have our eyes on the new Altec Lansing Orbit-MP3 speaker, which seems to provide the perfect solution.
A while ago I bought a set of wireless bluetooth headphones (these ) that do not require a special dongle, just a bluetooth-enabled computer. With the arrival of Leopard I can finally get the stereo audio output and iTunes track-skip control that I was waiting for. Armed with my new bluetooth headphones, I tried to use it with Mac Os X Tiger with less then satisfying results and got it to work under Ubuntu using Bluetooth-alsa, but without the crucial bluetooth AVRCP protocol that allows me to control the media player software on the computer.
The most annoying part was that it worked flawlessly with the Nokia N95 phone, even AVRCP track-skip control. Given the fact that in terms of processing and capabilities the computer usually beats the phone hands-down, this added to my utter sense of frustration. Buying Leopard was worth every penny because I am happy to report that audio output is crisp and clear over bluetooth using the A2DP protocol and the AVRCP protocol works like a charm with iTunes, exactly the way I want it.