Random update, DIY Wirelesss Guitar Hero

Yikes, it’s been nearly a month since I updated this last. A lot has happened since then… but I’ll skip to some more recent things.

David is a Californian, as of last Tuesday! He kept busy buying furniture and waiting in line at the DMV, but I did manage to see him at my birthday dinner last week. He and I cooked dinner last night: Ahi tuna steaks with a southwestern papaya/pineapple/habanero salsa, and a habanero pilaf dish on the side. Mmm.

I’ve been in a tinkery mood lately. I recently replaced my old noisy analog audio routing system (an A/B box and about 30 feet of cable) with a shiny new all-digital solution. I have a USB sound adaptor near the TV. It gets digital audio from the TV, and outputs directly to the speakers. It’s attached to the computer in my nearby cabinet, which does all the mixing in software.

After trying several software solutions for the audio mixing problem, I’ve settled on PulseAudio with a trivial extension module that routes audio from the TV input directly to the speaker output. I can now play TV audio, music from MPD, networked audio from my laptop, or any combination of the above. Latency hasn’t been noticeable, though I haven’t done any measurements yet.

The computer in my closet (mini-navi) has gone through a couple more revisions. In order to support audio mixing and icecast, I upgraded it from an NSLU2 to my old 700 MHz PIII laptop. This gave me the performance I needed, but that old laptop has some really serious Cardbus interrupt routing issues that prevented me from getting USB 2.0 working properly. After all that frustration, I splurged a little and got a mini-itx board with a 1 GHz Via C3. I love the novelty of mounting a motherboard with wood screws.

Before dinner with David last night, we decided to finally buy Guitar Hero. There had always been talk of building a wireless guitar controller