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Part II: Home Entertainment
scheduling and buffering to record
audio from an FM tuner card. Frank
will start recording the audio using
Sox and OggEnc, and then play
it back with a few seconds of buf-
fer using XMMS, a Linux media
player. During playback, audio will
be played through the sound card,
which is connected to an FM trans-
mitter. The FM transmitter allows us
to listen to buffered audio from any
radio in the house. You’ll control the
system to pause, rewind, and fast-
forward the radio broadcast with a
programmable IR (infrared) remote
across a whole-house IR distribution
system.
Project Overview
This project will be built in six phas-
es, which correspond to the six lay-
ers of the project architecture:
1. FM Receiver
2. Audio Recorder
3. Audio Playback
4. Whole-House Audio
5. Whole-House Control Distri-
bution
6. Scheduling and Buffering
Each of these components is modu-
lar, so you can complete them in a
different order if you’re waiting for
a part to arrive or if you’re particu-
larly interested in a certain aspect of
the project. You can even pick and
choose the components you want to
do: if all you want is a whole-house
audio system, work through Phase 4
and Phase 5. If you want to record
Figure 9-1. Conceptual diagram for
whole-house time-shifted FM radio.
Project Overview
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