Boodler Accessories

This is a page of random scripts and tools which might be handy to go with Boodler. Or for other uses.

leash -- Boodler UI

My friend Goob has written a user-interface layer for Boodler. It's Python (2.1 or later required) and uses the curses module for a simple terminal-window interface. It shows all the Boodler classes and agents you have available. You can control it by keyboard, or with a remote control (see below).

You run this script in addition to Boodler. Boodler should be set running with the listen.Leash agent:

python boodler.py --listen listen.Leash
If you want to use serialwatch.py as well, you should also be running this:
python serialwatch.py --port 31864
Not much documentation otherwise. Experiment.

serialwatch -- X10 connectivity

The X10 company sells an MP3 player package which includes a Windows-based MP3-playing program, a universal remote control, and a serial port dongle that receives commands from the remote. Conveniently, the remote and the dongle communicate via RF, not infrared. And since the dongle just pumps binary data into the port (9600 baud, 8N1), it's easy to make use of the thing under Linux.

(I'm told the X10 motion-detector sends RF commands in the same way. So this script should work for that as well.)

Anyway, this is a Python script for Linux, which squats on the serial port, listening for remote commands. It translates them into commands on a TCP/IP connection -- the format used by Boodler. (The current version of Boodler has some agents which accept these commands. See listen.Catalog and listen.RemoteVolume in the catalog of soundscapes.)

See the script comments for full documentation.

runboodler.sh -- quick shell script

Stephan Beal writes:
Attached is a small helper shell script which i have found useful. If launched without args it launched the curses interface, otherwise it passes the args as-is to boodler. Maybe it will be useful to you and yours. Simply change the BOODLER_HOME variable at the top of the script and it "should" work.

soundboard.php -- Web server app

Nathan Schmidt writes:
I've been playing around with the idea of using boodler as the output side of a syslog auralization mechanism for my company's web system. [...] Part of this process for us involves wrapping a bit of php around the python, since that's much more familiar territory for me. I've appended a simple harness which should run with minimal modification on anyone else's machines. It just makes shell calls out to the boomsg.py scripts but builds a html page with links for the various available effects and sounds. Not as tidy as the leash.py curses tool but we're web people so it makes more sense for us.

Last updated June 4, 2007.

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