All,

I've written a program that integrates the Squeezebox with Russound's
RNET audio system keypads. Basically, the program does two things.
First, it echoes, in near-real time, whatever is on the Squeezebox
display to the Russound keypad's display. Second, it allows the Russound
keypad's buttons to control the Squeezebox, much like a Squeezebox
remote. It can therefore be used to not only display the current song
title, artist, etc. on Russound keypads, but also to fully navigate the
Squeezebox's menus to select and play music library items, internet
radio items, favorites, etc., etc.  Conceptually simple, but it was a
bear to get working!

I wrote the program mostly as an exercise to learn the Lua language
(which I've come to like very much), and it's working fine for my
purposes. It would require a good bit of tightening-up, error checking,
testing, and documentation before it would be useable by others. I
wanted to make sure there's sufficient demand for such an animal before
I spend any further time working on this. 

The program was developed/tested with Lua on Windows (WinLua), a single
Russound CAV6.6 controller, six UNO-S2 keypads, a Squeezebox v2, and
SqueezeCenter v7.3.2.  I'm not sure how it will work/look with other
Russound keypad types, nor with other Squeezebox models (I assume the
Squeezebox v3 should be fine).  The program supports only one Squeezebox
as a Russound system source, but should work with multiple-controller
configurations (and should work with the new ACA-C5 controller).  The
Lua bytecode *should* be compatible with other 32-bit platforms,
including OSx and Linux, but I don't have the equipment to test this.

Note that in order to communicate with the Russound controller you need
to have a PC with a physical serial (RS-232) connection to the
controller.  I could not find a Lua library that supports binary serial
communications with embedded nulls, so this PC needs to run a Tcp-based
virtual serial connection.  I'm using and recommend the free program
VSPE (Virtual Serial Ports Emulator).  The interface program does not
need to run on the same PC that has the serial connection, nor the same
device running SqueezeCenter (all the communications are done using Tcp
connections).

If there's a lot of interest in this I'll try to continue working on it
further, but this is a very part-time activity for me and I can't
guarantee any dates. 

Regards...


-- 
someonewho
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