The Zana Zen

Hello folks,
Recently I bought a dell inspiron 1520 laptop, Life was good, everything was working great!!!
Till one day – My room mate, bought a Dell XPS 1530M laptop,
If it was not enough that he has GDDR3 memory and I have GDDR2, he also received a little dell remote that fits inside the
express card socket on the side – This remote also worked on my computer.
So I went to ebay and got me a remote as well!
But I still had to top the GDDR3 superiority his laptop had, in one way or another.
So I decided i want to be able to control my winamp from my N95 via bluetooth.

The result was pretty nice (:

A Server program written in TCL which listens for tcp connections and bluetooth serial connections,
the server generates playlists when it starts according to the music folder structure on the computer,
and allows the user to load playlists and control winamp from the phone over internet, WiFi and bluetooth.

A Client python program sitting on your phone that acts as a remote.

The program requires a few steps to get going so if you really want it to work on your phone
(symbian s60 v3) you will need to put some effort in preparing the needed prerequisites.

1. Install TCL on your computer from Activestate
2. Extract twapi.zip to your c:/tcl/lib/twapi (or any other /tcl/lib/twapi folder)
3. Install python for s60, and python shell for s60 on your phone.
4. On your phone, Create a folder in your memory card called IMG inside Python
   This will look like /memorycard/Python/IMG
   Extract all these Images to this folder, so they will all be inside /python/IMG/
5. Copy this python file to your phone.
6. On your computer, Create a bluetooth com (serial port)
   consult your bluetooth manual on doing so.
7. Put this inside a folder, extract it and run hotkeys.tcl – This is the server side application that should always run on your computer.
   (Run it with wish/wish84/wish85)
8. If an error message pops, read it – and follow the instructions until they stop popping – they do not pop for no reason!!!
9. After all is set, run the remotebt3.py in the interactive python interpeter on your s60 phone.
10. Choose a connection method, if you choose Bluetooth, be sure to have a paring to your computer already set.
11. If you choose TCP, make sure you have a wifi with DHCP and no firewall is blocking hotkeys.tcl which on default listenes on tcp port 9090 for new connections.
12. If you get connected a green box will appear with the connection method, now for a few stuff you can do :
    • Press 2 for a menu of things you can do.
      They are pretty easy to understand – the only one which needs some clearing is :
      Rebuild m3u list – this one recreates your m3u files from your music folder configured inside hotkeys.conf
    • press 8 to select a playlist from the ones generated by hotkeys on your computer.
    • press SEND to connect in a different connection way (bluetooth/wireless/internet)
    • Pressing 3 times on W will open/close winamp.

Feel free to change / Distribute / do anything with the tcl and python code,
“Clamp” is a free tool downloaded from the internet, and all right about this cool tool is kept for it’s original creator
I am just using it – I did not create it.

I know the install prcedure is not fun,
but i did not have time to study nokia .sis creation and making a nice installer for windows
if you feel these are lacking – Create them!
For questions, contact me at eitamaa (at) gmail (dot) com.

(Have I topped the GDDR3 or not??)

Cheers,

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 30th, 2008 at 12:29 pm and is filed under programming, random. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.