Nard for embedded music installation

[James Hughes]

I did a permanent art installation using Raspberry Pi and Python and it's
been a pain. Python is very heavy weight and not really meant to run in an
unattended environment for years on end. There's just a lot going on with
garbage collection and big libraries. It's using sciPy for some
interpolation and there's actually a memory leak in sciPy... You might be
able to get a reliable system running if you choose your libraries and
versions very carefully. If rebooting every night is an option, then that
may work ok, too.

I'm currently porting the whole thing to NARD and straight C. It's a simple
app using GPIO and occasionally posting some logging info to the web for
monitoring purposes, but I feel a lot better about putting that in a
vitrine and forgetting about it. This thing runs 24/7/365.

On Sun, Aug 21, 2016 at 3:21 PM, Wojtek Mitus <woytekm at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Dan, python is also ok - it depends on you - what you like more and feel
> more comfortable with. Nard will happily run dedicated c application,
> python script or bash script. You need to add python to the build though,
> cause it's not included by default (i think). And regarding RSS demo of my
> player - i tried to catch somewhat more optimistic news for the demo clip,
> but this "gem" slipped through :)
> Cheers,
> Wojtek
>
>
> 2016-08-21 22:08 GMT+02:00 Daniel McAnulty <dan at keithmcmillen.com>:
>
> >
> > Very cool clock radio!  That's a great idea and implementation.
> >
> > I've been trying to find if there's any good research on successive power
> > cycling with Nard vs a standard Read-Only implementation of Rasbian?
> >
> > I'm thinking for this project I'll probably set up a power supply on a
> > timer
> > to power cycle the device a couple hundred times and make sure it's still
> > working at the end of it, but I would imagine I'm not the first one to
> > want to do that.  Has anybody else published research on it that anyone
> > is aware of here?  I've looked but haven't found anything reliable.
> >
> > Hahahah, I just got to the part of the RSS channel feed where the
> Raspberry
> > Pi is reading off the news about 'the New South Wales forest where a
> > notorious serial killer buried his victims', it's a little jarring :)
> >
> > Super cool though, that looks like a fun way to wake up.
> >
> > Dan
> >
> >
> > > On Aug 21, 2016, at 12:48 PM, Wojtek Mitus <woytekm at gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > Hello Daniel, i think that Nard suits your needs perfectly, but you
> need
> > > some Linux knowledge to understand and configure your build
> environment,
> > > write some startup scripts for your application, etc. There is
> something
> > > like media player in Nard examples if i remember correctly - maybe that
> > > would be a good start for you. I would use BASS library (
> > > http://www.un4seen.com/) for such a project, and write c application
> to
> > do
> > > exactly what you need to do (be aware that BASS is free only for non
> > > commercial projects). Here's an example of audio related project based
> on
> > > Nard - my internet radio player running c application using BASS
> routines
> > > to stream/mix/play mp3 streams from internet:
> > > https://hackaday.io/project/6672-iris-network-radio-with-alarm-clock .
> > > Cheers,
> > > Wojtek
> > >
> > >
> > > 2016-08-21 5:12 GMT+02:00 Daniel McAnulty <dan at keithmcmillen.com>:
> > >
> > >>
> > >> Hello, I'm looking into using Raspberry Pi's to replace some
> > >> older-generation compact flash mp3 players I used for several sound
> and
> > >> music installations, but I'm a bit worried about 'gallery-proofing'
> and
> > >> making them difficult to brick by turning off the power repeatedly.
> > Nard
> > >> seems like a perfect solution, but a lot to get up to speed with for
> me
> > >> since my expertise is in embedded C and high level things like Python,
> > but
> > >> I'm not a real Linux expert.
> > >>
> > >> My hope with the Raspberry Pi was to be able to get python doing some
> > list
> > >> processing on directories of mp3 files, and then calling something
> like
> > >> mpg321 to play them out several usb audio adapters.  Does that sound
> > like a
> > >> reasonable use of Nard?
> > >>
> > >> As long as it doesn't sound like a totally wrong approach and I can be
> > >> confident that it will be the right tool in th long run, I'm willing
> to
> > put
> > >> some time in to get it to work.  But I'm hoping someone who knows more
> > >> about it can help me decide ahead of time whether it's the right
> > direction.
> > >>
> > >> Thanks!
> > >>
> > >> Dan McAnulty
> > >>
> > >>
> >
> >
>