Moving the streaming media player control panel across the Sewing Room for E-Z access:
Stipulated: garish labels that don’t fit the keys well at all.
I need more than one stream for testing; the only one that matters is Classical.
The keypad uses the same 2.4 GHz ISM band as the Raspberry Pi’s Wifi radio, which means holding a key down (which should never happen) puts a dent in mplayer’s cache fill level. Even absent that interference, the WiFi link seems more than a little iffy, probably because it’s at the far end of the house and upstairs from the router.
Other WiFi devices report that 2.4 GHz RF has trouble punching through the intervening fifty feet of hardwood floor (on the diagonal, the joists amount to a lot of wood) and multiple sets of doubled wallboard sheets; the RPi probably needs a better radio with an actual antenna. I did move the WiFi control channel away from the default used by the (relatively distant) neighbors, which seemed to improve its disposition.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
Comments
5 responses to “Streaming Player: Wireless Keypad”
WiFi connectivity between devices has become important enough in our house that a mesh WiFi network is my next technology investment.
Not only are we supposed to have everything online all the time, we were promised flying cars …
Doesn’t that halt button seem perilously close to VOL+ and PREV? I would be tempted to put it on DEL and not have anything over it, or to num lock and remap everything important away from it.
And… a dummy reply because I forgot to click the email response button…
Aye!
The current version of the code requires push-and-hold on the Backspace key. When it sees that scancode with the
KEY_HOLDflag, then it pulls the plug. Better than the hairtrigger version you see here and probably durable enough for us.Turns out NumLock doesn’t produce a unique scancode and doesn’t work as a separate key; I’d rather have another button, too!