[talmage]

Music Player Daemon is a popular music server.  Clients communicate with it either locally or over a network using a well defined, text protocol and one of a number of client libraries.  Would it be hard to make Tangara a Music Player Daemon server? That would be way cool and it would let people (ok, it would let me) use an MPD client on my phone to control Tangara in the car.

[jacqueline]

Hi!

There's nothing in MPD's protocol that scares me *too* much; 90% is functionality that Tangara already has, or would be an easy and good thing to add. The main big effort involved would likely be in just the sheer size of the API surface.

How would you expect your phone to be communicating with Tangara in this case? Over wifi maybe? If so, then bringing up the wifi stack will also likely block any kind of features like this.

Still, this would be a super fun idea. And I think it fits well within what a lot of other folks have been asking about vis-a-vis remote control of various forms.

[talmage]

Yes, I was thinking that the phone would communicate with Tangara over Wifi.

Maybe there's a way to use the MPD protocol over bluetooth. I'm not aware of any clients that can do that but I don't see why it wouldn't work. It's just a stream of bits, right?

I thought about a little hardware box that controls Tangara over USB. It could run any number of control protocols (e.g., MPD, MPRIS), mediating them for Tangara's native protocol. But that's a little box that someone would have to design and make. That's probably beyond me. I gave up working on electronics after I let the magic smoke out of a couple of power supplies just by giving them the side eye.

[talmage]

...
bringing up the wifi stack will also likely block any kind of features like this.
...

Is the wifi stack not instantiated by default? And so I would have to do that, integrating the wifi settings management with the firmware?

Is there enough memory in the ESP32 for Tangara code and Espressif's lwIP?

[jacqueline]

We have the ESP-IDF wifi stack available in the build, but we're yet to do anything around initialising it, adding settings, etc. We will eventually get to it, but it's been low priority for us until post-shipping.

There will certainly be some memory limitations we have to deal with, but I'm not sure of the details yet. I suspect wifi+bt+music streaming active at the same time might be tricky, but I'm expecting just wifi+music streaming to be okay. We'll see!