Lua and the Creative Zen X-Fi ADK
2011-May-25, Wednesday 10:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chebeHey! Whoa, look at that, nearly two weeks since my last update. Sorry about that, got lost in exam-land for a while, but I've found my way out at last. And what did I do to celebrate? Go out for a drink? Dancing maybe? Sat down and watched a film? Did I heck! I sat down and wrote an app for my music player.
I don't have a fancy phone (nor even a fully functioning one come to think of it) so I've missed out on all this app-writing malarkey until now. When I got my new music player a couple of months back, it turned out I could write apps for it with Lua, using the Application Development Kit the manufactures provided (basically a layer of abstraction and a simulator). I put off trying it out simply because I didn't need another distraction! But first chance I got I cracked open my old Windows machine and got stuck in. Seems Lua is a big language in the realm of computer games, and I have to say, if my limited experience is anything to go by I can see why. I sat down, and in only a handful of hours had written my own brand new app from scratch, without any previous knowledge of the language! (Well, except some small nmap script edits.) This was helped by very good documentation being included with the ADK.
What I learned/did boils down to creating buttons and listening for specific events, then triggering a response. I created my own pocket xylophone. The music player has a resistive touch-screen, so I made eight rainbow coloured bars, that when struck play a note from the Major C scale (starting at middle C). I grabbed the colour codes from here, and the note frequencies from here.
Notes;
- to load app onto player simply drag and drop project folder into applications folder.
- icon needs to be called icon, and lua script main. Where can I change this?
- playing wavs or generating your own tone from a frequency, you can only play one at a time.
- audio.beep doesn't do anything on the pc, have to test on player.
- the loudness seems to vary greatly, wonder if there's anything to be done about that?
It's simple, it's far from slick or fancy, but it's my first app, and I'm finding it tons of fun! I'm going to develop it a bit further, try and add different kinds/levels of responsiveness, maybe nice graphics, etc. Here, have a screenshot of the simulator (my camera is being awkward so no videos just yet);
I don't have a fancy phone (nor even a fully functioning one come to think of it) so I've missed out on all this app-writing malarkey until now. When I got my new music player a couple of months back, it turned out I could write apps for it with Lua, using the Application Development Kit the manufactures provided (basically a layer of abstraction and a simulator). I put off trying it out simply because I didn't need another distraction! But first chance I got I cracked open my old Windows machine and got stuck in. Seems Lua is a big language in the realm of computer games, and I have to say, if my limited experience is anything to go by I can see why. I sat down, and in only a handful of hours had written my own brand new app from scratch, without any previous knowledge of the language! (Well, except some small nmap script edits.) This was helped by very good documentation being included with the ADK.
What I learned/did boils down to creating buttons and listening for specific events, then triggering a response. I created my own pocket xylophone. The music player has a resistive touch-screen, so I made eight rainbow coloured bars, that when struck play a note from the Major C scale (starting at middle C). I grabbed the colour codes from here, and the note frequencies from here.
Notes;
- to load app onto player simply drag and drop project folder into applications folder.
- icon needs to be called icon, and lua script main. Where can I change this?
- playing wavs or generating your own tone from a frequency, you can only play one at a time.
- audio.beep doesn't do anything on the pc, have to test on player.
- the loudness seems to vary greatly, wonder if there's anything to be done about that?
It's simple, it's far from slick or fancy, but it's my first app, and I'm finding it tons of fun! I'm going to develop it a bit further, try and add different kinds/levels of responsiveness, maybe nice graphics, etc. Here, have a screenshot of the simulator (my camera is being awkward so no videos just yet);
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