Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] PS3 Success at last

[Eric Blossom]

On Mon, Oct 08, 2007 at 03:42:18AM -0400, Robert McGwier wrote:
> 
> I have 2.6.23-rc8 running and alsa-audio working nicely except directly 
> in gnuradio.  One needs to add the PS3.conf to /etc/alsa as instructed 
> by Lavan on his Cell addons disk and then configure the sound card and 
> the audio test works.  We have some little gotcha in the alsa sink that 
> I have been unable to find, so I gave up for now.

After enabling a bit of diagnostic output, it turns out that the PS3
alsa interface won't accept RW_INTERLEAVED stereo samples.  This
shouldn't be hard to work around.  We'll need to support the
RW_NONINTERLEAVED or MMAP_NONINTERLEAVED access type in addition to
RW_INTERLEAVED.

Volunteers?

address@hidden audio]$ ./dial_tone.py
audio: using audio_alsa
PCM name: hw:0,0
Access types:
    MMAP_INTERLEAVED     NO
    MMAP_NONINTERLEAVED  YES
    MMAP_COMPLEX         NO
    RW_INTERLEAVED       NO
    RW_NONINTERLEAVED    YES
Formats:
    S16_BE               YES
    S24_BE               YES
Number of channels
    min channels: 2
    max channels: 2
    2 channels  YES
Sample Rates:
    min rate:   44100 (dir = 0)
    max rate:   96000 (dir = 0)
      8000  NO
     16000  NO
     22050  NO
     32000  NO
     44100  YES
     48000  YES
     96000  YES
    192000  NO
audio_alsa_sink[hw:0,0]: failed to set access mask: Invalid argument
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./dial_tone.py", line 55, in <module>
    my_top_block().run()
  File "./dial_tone.py", line 48, in __init__
    dst = audio.sink (sample_rate, options.audio_output)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.5/site-packages/gnuradio/audio_alsa.py", line 
236, in sink
    return _audio_alsa.sink(*args)
RuntimeError: audio_alsa_sink



> I had hoped when I introduced portaudio that it would be useful to 
> windows and some of the "other" PC's.  It has again. I configured 
> portaudio to only support alsa and jack.  I modified a few python audio 
> scripts to use the audio_portaudio sink and they work perfectly.

You can avoid modifying code by specifying the default audio
module in ~/.gnuradio/config.conf  E.g.,

[audio]
verbose = True
#audio_module = audio_portaudio
#audio_module = audio_oss
audio_module = audio_alsa


> I am not cross compiling yet so it only took 3 hours for gnuradio to 
> compile from scratch (!!) on the PS3 but this is enough for me to plug 
> up the usrp later today and see what works.

After I turned off all unnecessary services, and changed the
initdefault from 5 to 3 in /etc/inittab,  it took under 1 hour ;) 

FYI, even when running in init mode 3 (no X login), you can still
start an X session from the text mode command line using

  $ startx

Eric