[IAEP] Fwd: Heart Rate Monitor Peripheral

[Walter Bender]

Peter,

In the ticket, I was trying to express my ignorance of how to proceed,
but not suggest that the distros haven't dealt with these sorts of
issues in the past.

There are two separate issues I encountered with TA (and Measure). One
is the need for patches to the alsa audio to accommodate the special
OLPC hardware modifications. The other is a means within the Sugar
bundling system to include binaries for multiple architectures. I
actually had written a work-around for the former, but I remain
ignorant about the details of how to best handle the latter. (At one
point, Sascha had helped me include a script that would build the
appropriate binaries at install time, but that solution depends upon a
build environment be installed, which is not the default for most OLPC
systems. Oops.)

Regarding available sensors, Arjun describes some on the Measure page
in the OLPC wiki

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Measure

There are also many people working on USB sensor input devices that
would be great to support in general.

thanks.

-walter

On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 8:22 AM, Peter Robinson <pbrobinson at gmail.com> wrote:
> There's generally no issue with hardware specific packages in distros
> (there certainly isn't an issue in Fedora), from the quick read I had
> of the ticket it looks more like the turtle activity didn't work on
> the non XO hardware. I presume that's because it couldn't load the
> specific libraries. Generally you would put the hardware specific bits
> in either a separate package from the app or a sub-package so that for
> devices where the hardware isn't present it doesn't need to be
> installed. This though would require the app to be able to detect the
> whether drivers/plugins are present or not and deal with it. There
> would be no issue installing them by default as long as it doesn't
> disturb other sound cards that aren't supported.
>
> Peter
>
> BTW the idea of the hardware sensors is very cool. Is there somewhere
> you can see what sensors are available for the XO and buy them?
>
>
>> Right now this device works primarily with the XO-1, taking advantage
>> of the AC/DC conversion going on in the XO's audio-in port.  But if
>> the gain were tweaked a bit more it could work with other audio cards.
>>
>> The fact that it is XO-1 Hardware specific means that packaging for
>> different architectures isn't a problem in the short run, correct?
>>
>> On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 7:56 AM, Peter Robinson <pbrobinson at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Alas, the blocker with Measure (and Turtle Art with Sensors) is that
>>>> we haven't come to consensus regarding a packaging strategy for the
>>>> binary drivers we include for support of the sensor input; these
>>>> differ by architecture, which wasn't a problem when we were building
>>>> for just one architecture. Perhaps the packaging gurus can chime in.
>>>> (See http://dev.sugarlabs.org/ticket/155).
>>>
>>> So the sensors are the ones that can get plugged into the audio
>>> input/output on the XO? Is this custom to the XO or could be
>>> conceivably be implemented/used on other audio cards?
>>>
>>> Peter
>>>
>>
>



-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org