[IAEP] Fwd: Heart Rate Monitor Peripheral

Peter Robinson pbrobinson at gmail.com
Wed Apr 8 08:22:51 EDT 2009


There's generally no issue with hardware specific packages in distros
(there certainly isn't an issue in Fedora), from the quick read I had
of the ticket it looks more like the turtle activity didn't work on
the non XO hardware. I presume that's because it couldn't load the
specific libraries. Generally you would put the hardware specific bits
in either a separate package from the app or a sub-package so that for
devices where the hardware isn't present it doesn't need to be
installed. This though would require the app to be able to detect the
whether drivers/plugins are present or not and deal with it. There
would be no issue installing them by default as long as it doesn't
disturb other sound cards that aren't supported.

Peter

BTW the idea of the hardware sensors is very cool. Is there somewhere
you can see what sensors are available for the XO and buy them?


> Right now this device works primarily with the XO-1, taking advantage
> of the AC/DC conversion going on in the XO's audio-in port.  But if
> the gain were tweaked a bit more it could work with other audio cards.
>
> The fact that it is XO-1 Hardware specific means that packaging for
> different architectures isn't a problem in the short run, correct?
>
> On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 7:56 AM, Peter Robinson <pbrobinson at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Alas, the blocker with Measure (and Turtle Art with Sensors) is that
>>> we haven't come to consensus regarding a packaging strategy for the
>>> binary drivers we include for support of the sensor input; these
>>> differ by architecture, which wasn't a problem when we were building
>>> for just one architecture. Perhaps the packaging gurus can chime in.
>>> (See http://dev.sugarlabs.org/ticket/155).
>>
>> So the sensors are the ones that can get plugged into the audio
>> input/output on the XO? Is this custom to the XO or could be
>> conceivably be implemented/used on other audio cards?
>>
>> Peter
>>
>


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