Joe Button's Website

Since I moved to Bristol I haven't listened to most of my music collection, which remained packed away on a hard drive for several months. I have now addressed this state of affairs in a characteristically ludicrous and impractical manner.

My friend Wayne was kind enough to donate me his surplus Linksys NSLU2, which I've installed the fabulous OpenWrt on. The prebuilt image I tried didn't seem to play nicely with bluetooth so I built my own version out of svn. I installed mpd and connected my USB hard drive and speakers.

Recklessly disregarding this wise admonishment, I decided to knock together my own solution to controlling the music player from my bluetooth phone. There are various solutions already, but they all seemed a little on the heavy/byzantine side for me and my slug. So, I threw together a small C program to relay messages from my bluetooth phone to mpd. Actually it just relays messages sent via bluetooth to any host/port, so there might plausibly be some other use for it. Don't know what though.

This just left the app to run on my phone. The phone's a nokia 6021 and runs J2ME/MIDP2.0. I'm not much of a java programmer but I managed to create a somewhat working app (source here). To describe it as basic is understating the case, but hopefully at some point I'll get round to turning it into something more complete.