PiBox » PiBoid

I now have adkt function (in androidtest) for building a test application. It contains information on how to work with Android from the command line.

Once I've completed the tutorial I'll need to create a Dia flowchart showing how the application will operate.

Successfully built the GridView tutorial. This will become the baseline for the initial android app. Initially I called this PiDroid but a google search shows there are other apps/projects named PiDroid. So the official name will be PiBoid, which is PiBox for Android.

I'm going to clean up the code to make sure the app and package names are correct, then import to gitorious.

After that I'll create the Dia diagram for how this app should operate and interact with PiBox.

Note: when building the GridView tutorial I discovered that the sample images provided, which were in JPEG format, didn't work. I had to convert them to PNG. Just a personal note that the PiBox Android app should use PNGs and not JPEGs.

I now have a 3x3 grid I can use for the main navigation commands as well as menu options for selecting and adding remote devices to control.

1. Save devices to a file
2. Show the devices in the file
3. Allow deleting devices where we select them
4. Create icons for the 3x3 grid

Userid/password prompt for login to remote host has been added and credentials are saved between uses.
Added the connected device to the ActionBar, when connected.
Created two custom keyboards: alphabetic and numeric/special keys. These have support for capturing their keycodes, which match ASCII values for the printed characters.

1. Perform the actual login to the remote device's web service.
2. Create a service that can send through the connection the keycodes as they are pressed.

Note that the main keypad should map to the keycodes used by GTK+ for the arrow, Enter, Tab and ESC keys.

I've completed the core/stubs of the Android app through to the point of having it send keycodes from the keypad to the PiBox server. I can see the request arrive at the Monkey web server but don't have any code on the web server to handle it yet. That comes next as I develop the PiBox side of this project.

What's missing on the Android side is to handle all keystrokes from the keypad and the two soft keyboards. I've currently implemented some keypad keys as GDK keysyms, such as KP_Left or Tab (see /usr/include/gtk-2.0/gdk/gdkkeysyms.h). To continue this I'll need to create a lookup table for each keystroke on the keypad or soft keyboards. There are only about 50 or 60 keys total so this is just a bit of busy work.

Using the keysyms should make it easier to work with a library on the PiBox side to translate into keystrokes under GTK+/GDK.

I've attached a few screenshots showing the main keypad and the custom soft keyboards. They don't show the device configuration and login but those are simple text fields and buttons, nothing special there. Note that it's possible to switch software keyboards using the keypad if your device doesn't cover the keypad by the keyboards. Alternatively you can close the keyboards using the keyboard button at the bottom/center of each keyboard.

The PiBox side of this task involves creating a new app library that can handle inbound messages automatically and pass them to a registered app-specific handler. This turns out to be a big deal and can require lots of changes to all the apps and appmgr. It's a very good idea because it allows message passing at a low level using a very unrestrictive messaging protocol and can (or so I expect) integrate with GTK+ to make it easier for the Android app to apply keystrokes to the currently running app. Even nicer: if the app doesn't support the library then the remote simply has no effect. It doesn't break anything.

However, it's also apparent that so many changes potentially break many things and, at the moment, the current codebase is very stable. So I've decided to make the 0.10.0 release with the current stable codebase but without the Android app, add a new release just for that (and the new app library) and push out the other two releases (hardware focus and TV/music apps) currently scheduled. That way I'll have a nice stable release I can use to do demos or use to introduce people to the project.

Pushing this task to 0.11.0.

It's unclear if this is really necessary anymore. But I'll hang onto it since so much work was done already.