Sound!

Getting the sound working was my next priority. The guys at Embedded ARM build and supply their own wireless drivers so I wasn’t too worried about getting that working, but the section of their setup document on sound was simply ‘TODO’. It turned out to be a bit more of a faff than I was hoping!

First up, I needed a kernel which had the soundcore installed — the ts11 kernel that was supplied on the board has no sound support compiled in at all. That meant building and installing my own kernel. Linux kernel building isn’t usually a problem nowadays; but I had to get the patched kernel tree from Embedded ARM, get that building, and then get it installed on the system.

First up, finding the patched kernel was a bit of a game of hide-and-seek: The website only talks of ts9 kernels. A bit of digging around and I found the ts11 kernel tree on their ftp server. Unpacking this directly onto my NFS root disk, I planned to compile it on the Weebox itself (no cross compilation yet, one more thing to go wrong!) I quickly realised a bit of modification was needed — the Makefile needs editing to not force cross-compilation. Then off we went, usual configuration (after a make ts7250_config to get a valid configuration), then building. Gosh I’ve forgotten how slow computers used to be — the build took about an hour.

In the meantime I was reading up on how I might actually install the image when finished. The ts7200 series boards use the Open Source boot manager RedBoot, which thankfully has a fair amount of well written documentation. As it turned out, installing the kernel image was a doddle — I needed to get a tftpd server running to serve the kernel image, then from within RedBoot I could download the image and store it into flash RAM in two simple commands.

Miraculously, the kernel worked first time, and booted up with sound support. Next step, getting the ALSA drivers for USB Audio working. I had already installed the Debian ALSA library and tools, I just needed the kernel modules. I unpacked the modules, and followed these steps to configure ALSA for usb audio alone. All went well, but then ‘make’ failed with some compilation issues. Firstly, the ALSA libraries seem not to support the kernel version 2.4.26. There are some kernel support structures (work_queue) that seemingly came in some version of 2.5.*, but apparently have been back ported into 2.4.26. A quick modification of the conditional compilation in include/acore.h and acore/misc.c fixed this. Another problem was the file ‘memalloc.c’ which needed to know which bus to allocate contiguous RAM from. As the Weebox doesn’t have either a PCI bus or an SBUS, the code #errors out with ‘Need a bus for dma_alloc_coherent()’. Throwing caution to the wind, I blatantly lied and changed the conditional if to always assume there was a bus, and all compiled!

With the module installed, and my shiny new kernel running, I loaded up the module, plugged in some headphones, and fired up alsamixer. ALSA correctly found my USB sound card — yay — so I turned the volume down to a manageable level (the USB dongle seems to be extremely loud and I didn’t want to destroy my Sennheisers!) Next, with baited breath I ran mpd and started playing some music....

No sound! Wahh! Ah, the volume in mpd is set to zero…let’s try 20%…nothing…50% nothing…oh dear. I was just about to give up and start diagnosing the code when I had a moment of doubt about the port I’d plugged the headphones into. Yup, that was it — plugging the headphones into the headphone socket on the USB dongle helps! I had glorious sound playing through my Weebox!

Very excited I experimented a lot more with it. MP3 playback using the MAD library takes around 5% cpu, not bad at all I thought! I remember with my ARM7-based machine having to offline ‘render’ mp3s to a WAV file to listen to them. How things have moved on! Next up, I tried OGG files…no sound, and MPD spinning at 100% cpu. Ah, yes of course. The MPD I was using was the one direct from Debian, which doesn’t use the integer-optimised OGG library, Tremor. I’d have to build my own MPD.

I really do need to sort out this cross-compiling lark. The binaries I make in Scratchbox just don’t seem to have the dynamic libraries configured correctly, I really need to learn about this some more, because building MPD natively took the rest of the day. Admittedly, in my excitement I had completely forgotten to install all the support libraries needed for MPD, which forced me to continuously have to reconfigure and rebuild. Indeed, only this morning (I left it building overnight) was I able to finally get my own MPD installed and running.

As I type I’m listening to an OGG file (Way Out West — Introvert / Seaside Floater) and it sounds great. OGG decode does rather take up more CPU though:

PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
5820 mpd      19   0  3132 3132 2796 R 60.3  5.1  27:26.34 mpd

Still, the Weebox won’t be doing anything other than playing sound, so 60% isn’t really a worry! Hooray!

Next up: getting the LCD panel displaying the song details.