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  • Stef 4:16 pm on 23 March, 2013 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , community, , , ,   

    Streaming Audio from Raspberry Pi – part 2 

    Episode two of my experiment with the Raspberry Pi I have received at Pycon 2013. On the way back from Santa Clara I stopped by Fry’s and bought the only USB sound card they had in store, a weird looking Creative and a powered USB hub.  I ordered also a case from Adafruit industries (not convinced of the case though).

    Raspberry Pi and USB sound card
    The output of lsusb:

    Bus 001 Device 006: ID 147a:e03d Formosa Industrial Computing, Inc.

    Hooked them all together, installed avahi-daemon on the Pi so I can ssh into it easily from any lan (ssh raspberrypi.local, although I should change its name to something more unique). Tested arecord locally first. It took me a while to figure out how to use arecord, it’s old stuff that I’m not very used to. You need to specify the hardware device. If you get this sort of error:

    arecord: main:682: audio open error: No such file or directory

    probably you haven’t specified that you want to record from the card that actually has an input device

    pi@raspberrypi ~ $ arecord -l
    **** List of CAPTURE Hardware Devices ****
    card 1: Audio [2 Channel USB Audio], device 0: USB Audio [USB Audio]
    Subdevices: 1/1
    Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

    I hooked my phone’s audio player to the mic input of the USB card so that there would be constantly audio coming in the Pi, then started recording

    pi@raspberrypi ~ $ arecord -D hw:1,0 -f s16_le -c 2 > test.wav

    I have specified the hardware device I want to use, the format and the number of channels. Playing back that file worked.

    pi@raspberrypi ~ $ aplay -D hw:1,0 test.wav

    Next step was to capture live audio from the line input of the USB card, transcode that to OGG Vorbis and ship the bits to the remote Icecast server I setup last week. I quickly gave up on ezstream and started using ices2, the Icecast client: it seems easier to manage as it takes care of the encoding. This is the input module I used for the Pi:

    <input>
    <module>alsa</module>
    <param name=”rate”>16000</param>
    <param name=”channels”>2</param>
    <param name=”device”>hw:1,0</param>
    <!– Read metadata (from stdin by default, or –>
    <!– filename defined below (if the latter, only on SIGUSR1) –>
    <param name=”metadata”>1</param>
    <param name=”metadatafilename”>liveaudio</param>
    </input>

    The USB soundcard I’m using sends 16000hz samples. I chose not to resample that, only to downmix stereo to mono to save bandwidth.

    <–  stereo->mono downmixing, enabled by setting this to 1 –>
    <downmix>1</downmix>

    And all seems to work: the Pi sends a clear signal up to the streaming server and it’s been doing that for a while. Big success so far. Next step for me will be to write a script that grabs data from the OpenStack Summit schedule for one room and adds that information as metadata for the streaming: this way the listeners will have an idea of who is speaking or what the session is about.

    Update: the stream was having a wide latency, around 20 seconds so I decided to play a little bit with the sampling rates. The latency went down to around 1 second using  <param name=”rate”>48000</param> in the input module and  <samplerate>48000</samplerate> in the encode module, with no resampling. Unfortunately the USB card dies every now and then when not connected through a powered USB hub. Too bad, because the USB hub looks ugly.

     

    • Ole N 11:58 pm on 14 May, 2013 Permalink | Reply

      Could you please give som more information about that soundcard? Can’t find it at Creative.

    • stefano zorzanello 4:31 pm on 15 May, 2013 Permalink | Reply

      Hi Stef,
      thank you for your great report about Pi audio streaming…..
      I’m completely new to this great world
      I would like to know if you think the Raspberry Pi would be the right shield for my project.

      I am a musician and sound designer, using Max/Msp, particularly interested on soundscape projects and researches, and this project is for an interactive sound installation in a real environment, with the sound produced by cicadas. As I’d prefer not to abandon a computer in a field, I assumed to use a microcontroller for this purpose.

      So Raspberry Pi should be involved in steps 1-2-4-5 of the following:

      1) sampling the sound locally produced by cicadas males during summer: mono signal is fine.
      2) sending a stream of samples through the web in real time: Raspberry Pi should be connected to the web via 3G (no ethernet cable).
      3) another computer placed in a studio should get this stream, making the audio treatments, re-sending it trough the web (splitted possibly into four independent synchronized channels-signals)
      4) downloading the 4 processed streams;
      5) distributing the sounds on a local multi speaker system, 4 channels basically.

      If you think that all this is feasible through a Raspberry Pi plus a proper internet networking shield, I would buy it as soon as possible. Could you also tell me in case it would be possible with only 2 channels (stereo) playing?

      I thank you very much for your attention, I stay waiting form an answer from you.

      Best regards

      stefano zorzanello

      • Stef 4:40 pm on 15 May, 2013 Permalink | Reply

        Hi Stefano, your project sounds interesting. I think you can do step 2 with the Pi but you’ll need to find a USB GPRS modem that supports ARM Linux drivers. I have no idea about that though. Also, I found the soundcard I bought not to be very stable: at times the driver seems to crash and the streaming stops. Unfortunately I have very little time to debug this. I’m considering shopping for a board that has native audio input and similar cost.

    • stefano zorzanello 5:10 pm on 15 May, 2013 Permalink | Reply

      thank you for your interest!
      yes I’ve to look for this USB GPRS modem that supports ARM Linux drivers……. maybe this will be the rock to climb…. I’, pretty sure you will find a more stable sound card…
      I was wandering for arduino plus audio codec shields… but it seems that arduino has not enough resources to support both 3g shield and audio codec at the same time……
      any way I’ll keep on studying the feasibility…

      in the while thank you very much..

      ciao

      stefano (so I have to avoid to sign myself “Stef” as I usually do!!)

  • Stef 4:02 am on 14 January, 2013 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: aaron, community, , suicide   

    Anger and disappointment 

    Any time a person takes its own life, anger is around with sadness. I’m angry too and I share Lawrence Lessig’s thoughts:

    the question this government needs to answer is why it was so necessary that Aaron Swartz be labeled a “felon.”

    This morning I was listening to a show in Italy a volunteer that talks to prisoners incarcerated into the horrible Italian jails. She mentioned a conversation with a man sentenced to six years for selling counterfeited CDs and DVDs on the streets. His words: “Six years! That’s too long”. We’re accepting that selling a song with no rights to do so is a crime worst than hitting a singer with a baseball bat. Our politicians should be ashamed.

    .

     

  • Stef 7:36 pm on 20 October, 2012 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: community, , recap, san diego, , todo   

    Back from San Diego OpenStack Summit 

    My experience at the OpenStack Summit in San Diego has been really good. I have received lots of positive comments about this configuration, merging the Design Summit with the Conference. Despite the high amount of people it seems that things went well. I’m waiting to gather more details about the remote participation to the Design Summit with WebEx, I’ll report more about that soon.

    I presented one session at the conference, lead two sessions on the Design Summit track and facilitated the meeting of the APEC group. Especially on the last day I missed the integration of the summit’s agenda from sched.org into my personal calendar applications (phone and desktop) because I ended up overbooking myself a couple of times. Thankfully Monty Taylor covered for me.

    The ‘Community Dashboard‘ that I presented with zAgile was received with enthusiastic comments: the crowd cheered ‘ship it’ when I asked them what they thought of the demo. I’ve talked with Sanjiva and Andrew after the presentation, we should have an early beta out there by the end of the year.

    More needs to be done in order to improve the community resources: IRC channels are not owned by the Foundation, some services depend by one person only (the main website and etherpad service, just to make an example). The forums need some love and probably we should have a Q&A system in place. During the sessions Atul Jha from India showed an askbot-powered system that he volunteered to run. In the next weeks I’ll help him go live with it. We discussed also the migration of the General mailing list out of Launchpad: unfortunately I have no news since my last update. The planet needs a better look, if nothing else. And the OpenStack blog needs a better content policy: some people in the room raised some concerns over the abuse of corporate posts on it.

    During the discussion on how to track OpenStack’s adoption I was suggested to focus on users’ survey instead of proposing to add some ‘telephone home’ capability to OpenStack’s code (like Mozilla Foundation does with Firefox). I think this is a good idea and I’ll make sure this will become a project of the Foundation in the next months, once we’ll be fully staffed (we’re hiring).

    Monty lead the session I proposed about an Integrated Identity System among all OpenStack tools. We went through the improvements we’re working on regarding the CLA workflow and its integration into Gerrit and the Foundation’s membership database. Todd Morey was in the session and we had more ideas on how to make things progress a bit faster (we agreed that hanging out on IRC is a prerequisite for make things happen faster). The future of Launchpad as the main ID system for OpenStack will be decided after Ubuntu Developer Summit: Thierry will spend time with Canonical’s folks there to understand if it will still be able to serve our purposes in the future.

    My list of things to do has increased, as it’s expected after the Summit. Thanks everybody for joining.

     

  • Stef 5:10 pm on 5 October, 2012 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , community, ,   

    New job, same job, at OpenStack Foundation, new laptop 

    This week was my first week as an employee of the OpenStack Foundation. I’m Technical Community Manager, still helping the OpenStack project succeed by helping the technical contributions. The difference is that my salary is now being paid by the newly formed OpenStack Foundation instead of Rackspace. Most of the people I worked with more closely at Rackspace are also at the OpenStack Foundation: Lauren, Mark, Jonathan and Thierry and we’re also hiring more people.

    I have high hopes for the projects I will present at the Grizzly Summit: Achieving Visibility and Insight Across OpenStack Projects with Dashboards, Traceability, and Faceted Search, Integrated identity system for OpenStack  and Tracking OpenStack adoption.

     The main thing that changed is my laptop: finally I got rid of that heavy brick I used to carry around and now I have a slick, top of the line Dell XPS 13, the Project Sputnik one, powered by Ubuntu. Oh, what a great machine. I love it already. It gets noisy some time but I believe that’s because I had to run java applets in the past days. I’ll post more details about how I set it up later on. Good times.
     

  • Stef 10:04 am on 30 July, 2012 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: cls, community, , opensourceway, ,   

    Measuring Community Growth 

    The discussion held a few weeks ago at Community Leadership Summit around how to ‘measure’ open source projects were very interesting. There was even a keynote by David Eaves during OSCON about the topic (well worth 15 minutes of your time, watch it below).

    There are many people comparing different open source projects, I keep seeing blog posts trying to extrapolate complex concepts from too simple facts. For example, it’s hard to evaluate if an open source project is growing just by looking at the total number of commits per week: when number of commits slow down it may mean that the codebase has reached maturity, not necessarily it’s a sign of diminishing interest. Other simple facts visible on github like the number of followers, forks or ‘watchers’ may not mean much if the developers of that project don’t use the ‘social’ features offered by github.

    To measure the “growth” of a project I usually look at a whole bunch of numbers and trends (more importantly) like the total number of committers over time, total new committers over time and also things that are not code-related traffic on mailing lists/forums, websites, google searches, activity on bug trackers as indicators of growth of a community. The total number of commits is more meaningful when taken as one element of ‘livelihood’ of a project (is it still maintained?) but it needs to be integrated with other elements to avoid making mistakes.

    All the people interested in measuring open source communities should join the Metrics Working Group at The Open Source Way and push the conversation forward.

     

  • Stef 1:41 pm on 14 June, 2012 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: community, ,   

    Skype is not beta anymore on GNU/Linux. So what? 

    I see lots of excitement within the GNU/Linux communities about the new, stable Skype. It makes me sad: it’s the worse kind software to be excited for. It’s designed to spy on you, it has a proprietary protocol, the software itself is badly designed, poor UI and lacks of many features compared to others. What’s more, using software like Skype that is not interoperable with other voice/messaging systems allows Microsoft to push in it creepy features like advertising next to your personal conversation. The network effect created by Skype is bad for humanity, we should treat Skype as a necessary evil and work to make people aware of reasonable alternatives.

    I’d be much happier if I saw communities cheering for the alternatives. For example, I wish Canonical added a xmpp/jingle service to its One product (and I’d love to pay for it). I wish the community knew that Google allows federation in its Google Talk service: you can reach your friends that use Google.com from your own jingle server. These are the things that we need, more than yet another proprietary protocol and software to take away our options.

     

  • Stef 10:20 am on 10 May, 2012 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: community, , international, , user groups   

    Planning an International Community Portal for OpenStack 

    With the large growth of OpenStack internationally comes the need to have a better system to list the international resources for new users of OpenStack. At the moment we have a couple of wiki pages, a mailing list for a team hosted on Launchpad and the map
    the /community page on openstack.org. All that content is available only in English. We’re at the point that this is not enough.

    I’d like to discuss the needs of the international community and get a new system in place in the next few weeks. The basic needs are:

    • A directory of OpenStack user groups (OSUG) that can host content in different languages: new visitors should be able to find easily an OpenStack User Group for their local area/language. If such group/language is not available, there should be an easy pointer to instructions, tools and policies to create one
    • A system for the community  managers to contact the members (all members or just the coordinators/leaders?) of the international communities to coordinate activities.

    Requirements

    • Register users using SSO: as a user I would like to be able to associate my profile from Launchpad, Linkedin or Google to the site
    • Support content in multiple languages (switch list and automatic recognition via browser agent configuration)
    • Support roles: managers of the groups can add resources to the directory, members can sign up as members, anonymous can read all content
    • Show activity from all groups in my own language on the portal home page
    • Directory of OSUGroups, with geographic representation (be able to view the groups on a map and display also the full list of groups on a page)
    • Manage content (pages) of generic interest (to host content like how to start a group, general, policies, trademark stuff, generic icons, etc)

    Per each user group:

    • allow users to add events, each group will expose its ical feed
    • show to list additional resources for the group: mailing lists, forums, wiki pages, home page, url of blogs,
    • import RSS feed from blogs to aggregate content on groups page
    • display photostreams from flickr and such on the home page

    Open questions

    • is this all we need?
    • do we want to host and provide web apps for any of the local groups (mlists, blog, forums, etc)? And if yes, should these be part of the such portal?
    • can we reuse code from Ubuntu Loco portal? The code is tightly integrated in Launchpad, local teams need to be created as Launchpad Teams, it uses Launchpad as OpenID provider (bugs included). But it’s already there, it’s fairly simple and it’s a django app
    • What other tools can we use for this and do you volunteer to manage such tool?

    I’m interested in your opinions: join the OpenStack International Community Team on Launchpad  to discuss this further.

     

  • Stef 10:27 am on 27 April, 2012 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: community,   

    Proud member of an effective community 

    In days like this I feel very lucky to be a member of the OpenStack community. The thread that started today demonstrates the great culture of collaboration among the people that make OpenStack.

    Following up on the discussion held at the Design Summit, Thierry suggested to split the Mailing-list in order to improve the communication among developers and users. The proposal requires a significant change in the current workflow for developers and adds a new burden on the infrastructure team.  A reason to be proud of this community is that the infrastructure team didn’t say ‘no’ like many IT shops would. They highlighted what they needed in order to do a good job satisfying the request. A volunteer jumped up to help (thank you Duncan) and off we go to do something without wasting time debating. This community is effective and gets things done.

     

  • Stef 9:29 pm on 5 November, 2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: community, , , ,   

    OpenStack at UDS 

    What a week! Ubuntu Developer Summit is one of the best meetings I have attended to. Here are a few things that impressed me most.

    The infrastructure is amazing! The networking is astonishingly good. I learned that the Ubuntu team bypasses the usually lame the Internet connections provided by the hotels and puts down their own. Ubuntu’s wifi was gratis, easy to join and always on! By comparison, the access provided by the hotel was mostly down and costed $10 per day.

    The participation is insane! Not only Canonical employees participate to the summit but also volunteers from around the world. In Orlando there were around 700 people all interested in making Ubuntu the greatest operating system in the world.

    OpenStack is everywhere! Three plenary sessions were dedicated to OpenStack and many sessions of the summit had to do with it. Canonical is putting lots of energy into making OpenStack its cloud. Mark Shuttleworth in one of these sessions made it also clear that he wants to provide resources for OpenStack to maintain compatibility Amazon’s API.

    Rackspace distributed the coolest t-shirts at the event: we ran out of three full boxes in a few minutes.

    The pace of the summit was not as mad as I imagined after looking at the schedule. Even if there are many parallel tracks from 9am to 6pm for five full days, I ended up with plenty of time free to meet people and talk with them. Sharing the same hotel with a big swimming pool and very nice weather probably helped the conversations. I enjoyed also the free buses available to go out in large groups.

    All in all, it was great to be there since OpenStack Developer Summit is modelled after UDS.

     

  • Stef 12:47 pm on 31 October, 2011 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: community, developers, ,   

    Shuttleworth sees Ubuntu as the universal OS 

    In his keynote this morning, Mark Shuttleworth sketched a future where by 2014 Ubuntu will be an universal platform on all devices with a screen. He mentioned Ubuntu-powered phones, TVs, tablets, cars, with the existing desktops and servers, all connected to the cloud. It’s a huge challenge.

    I’ve been hearing this story of the universal operating system many times in the past 20 years and nobody has managed to come up with one. I’ve seen the failure of LiMo, Maemo and Meego later (not Tizen), WebOS and more in direct competition with iOS and Android on the mobile/embedded space. Mark may succeed where others have failed.

     

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