In order to make it easier to provide support to my customers I decided it’s best to separate all things related to the 010dev brand from my personal stuff.

Starting today, 010dev is getting a new blog all for itself. All future announcements, workarounds and anything else related to the brand will be posted there.

http://blog.010dev.com

In addition, the same goes for my twitter account @010dev which I will leave to announcing news and providing support while moving all the jibber jabber to my private account @ka010 be sure to give me a follow.

If you recently purchased ReemoteHD and initially ran into issues like Reemote not being able to connect at all, here’s the workaround you’ve been waiting for… in addition, a “real fix” will ship in form of an update in the coming days as well.

I apologize for any inconveniences.

1. Kill the Reemote App on your iPad  (do so by brining up the app-switcher, then tap and hold the Reemote icon until it starts to wiggle, then tap the little remove sign to kill it) 
2. Open the Settings App and find the Reemote entry, you’ll see two options, a switch to toggle auto discovery (which should be ON) and a textfield to configure the server address. 
3. Turn off Auto Discovery and wait a second or two, then turn it on again.
4. Start the Reemote app, it should now be able to connect.

If you recently pushed the update all button in iTunes, you might have noticed that there have been a bunch of updates for all versions of Reemote for Airfoil lately, here’s whats new.

New Icons, yay !

I finally found the time for an already overdue redesign of the Reemote icons, so here they are, I hope you like em

Reemote for Airfoil and Reemote HD

Reemote for Airfoil and Reemote HD are now shipping in version 1.2.4 and 1.1.2 respectively. Besides the new icons, they both include various minor improvements plus a fix for an issue that causes labels to disappear on iOS4.

Reemote Server

Reemote Server, now shipping in version 1.2.4 comes with a new diagnose feature that makes it easy to spot all kinds of problems.

You can test you Mac or your iOS devices by emailing the test url to your device and pointing your browser to it.

The test will determine whether the Reemote server is operating properly and can be reached by the device running the test.

In case this test fails, please contact me directly for further instructions.

To find the options, open the Settings App and find the Reemote entry.

If Reemote only fails occasionally, it will automatically add your server’s address for you once it has been connected, so all you need to do is to disable auto-discovery and Reemote will connect to the server specified.

If Reemote never was connected to a server before, you’ll need to enter the server address yourself.
To do so, use the following format:

your-Mac.local.:50123

where your-Mac is the name of your mac as configured in System-Preferences -> Sharing
be sure to add .local. to specify the your local network domain followed by the server-port, which is 2323 50123. 

Update: Please note that with the release of ReemoteServer v.1.2.6 the server-port has changed from 2323 to 50123.

As usual, if you run into any problems just drop me mail!

Well, here it is, as promised, it works on both, Mac OSX and iOS (jailbroken)

Features

• Implements the MetaWatch Message Protocol
• Modular Architecture
• Mac OSX support via IOBluetooth or IOCTL
• iOS support via btstack
• Device Inquiry or direct connections
• Image rendering
• Text rendering
• Button configuration and events

Todo

Large parts of the MW Message Protocol are implemented already, but many minor messages are still missing.

Issues

Update: as of firmware version 0.8.0 this should no longer be an issue!

Due to issues with the watch’s internal bluetooth stack connections may become slow (really slow) after sending a few messages.

In detail, the issue is related to a power-saving feature on the bt link-layer that goes by the name “sniff mode”. It’s enabled automatically after a few seconds of inactivity, and makes the radio listen only in a preconfigured interval to reduce power consumption. In the event of incoming data, sniff mode should be exited automatically until the connection becomes inactive again, this however seems to be not working with various bt stack implementations, including the Mac OSX one, leading to long delays(1-2s) between delivery of messages.

Source

For source code and documentation head over to github

Here’s a video showing an iOS demo App.

code coming soon. see MWKit for more info, source-code and repository.

Well, it’s a watch obviously, kind of a smart watch but not actually that smart, basically it’s a remote display for other devices to write to, connections are made via Bluetooth using SPP (a serial port protocol).

Still, leaving it rather dumb was a smart move, so I don’t really know what to call it, it’s pretty cool that’s for sure

Anyhow, after few delays, my MetaWatch (which I had originally pre-ordered back in May) finally shipped and I had almost a week now to play with it, here’s what I came up with so far.

Environment and Tools

First off, this is what I used:

• an iMac running 10.7 Lion
• PyMetaWatch (my fork for Lion and serial support)
  for communicating with the watch
• Reemote Server (custom build)
  for controlling media playback
• OpenAMI on a router running openWRT
  for controlling home automation
• Growl and small proxy plugin (code coming soon)
  for desktop notifications

Multimedia – Reemote

I really do love to remote control things, so the first thing I wanted to do once the basics were implemented was to hookup PyMetaWatch to the Reemote Server so that I could control media playback in my entire apartment.

If you don’t know Reemote, check it out, it’s a iOS/Mac combination of Apps that provides remote control for Airfoil, which is the streaming solution for the Mac (and btw also named one of MacStories’ this year’s Must-Have Apps.)

However, what this allows me to do is to control whatever media player (e.g. iTunes, Spotify or Last.fm) is currently running on my Mac and since Airfoil is sitting in between, the audio gets streamed to individual speakers around my apartment as well allowing me to change tunes from my watch while walking to the kitchen and back

What’s still missing though are watch-controls for the speakers itself, so that individual speakers can be turned on or off.

How it works.

It’s a quick hack so it’s fairly simple, the screen controls are static, so what’s displayed on the screen is just a pre made image.

Remote control was already provided by the Reemote Server, so all that was left was to make the watch buttons trigger the corresponding actions on the server.
Luckily Remote is using JSON over HTTP so it can be easily interfaced from the command line using curl.

So basically that’s it. I’m using pywm.py (from PyMetaWatch) in idle mode with the buttons mapped to shell commands that curl a certain url on the Reemote Server (see pymw.cfg)

Home Automation – Light Controls

Next up was Home Automation, luckily this was just as simple.

The screen was pre made in photoshop (yes photoshop!) and the buttons mapped to shell commands triggering the corresponding actions on the openAMI Server which then does all the all the work.

Notifications – Growl

Since the watch is just perfect for displaying notifications, I figured integrating Growl would be a quick and easy way to get all kinds of notifications on the watch.

To do so I’ve implemented a simple Growl Display Plugin that acts as a proxy for notifications so they can be displayed on a regular Growl Display and the watch at the same time.

The plugin presents itself as a Display, if it’s set to the default style, all notifications will get sent to the watch using pywm.py and additionally passed to a regular display as well. If you know prowl, it works just the same.

Code will be released soon.

More MetaWatch Hacks

http://retrovirus.com/incr/2011/09/metawatch-hacks-resources/

http://www.dpin.de/~nils/metawatch.html

http://labs.kernelconcepts.de/Projects/MetaWatch/

http://metawatch.org

http://www.metawatch.org/forums/

Now, I have received a number of reports from users who have trouble getting their Reemote to connect to the Reemote server even though everything was setup correctly and the Mac OSX firewall and/or it’s stealth-mode option had been turned off, as described here.

Of course I immediately started investigating the issue, however, countless hours of debugging as well as rewriting most of my network code so far did not reveal anything at all. Instead it seems like the issue is somehow related to the Wifi network the App is operating on. More precisely it is WPA2 encryption that seems to be causing problems with these kind of Applications on iOS in general. 

Technical details

So, it appears that Bonjour on iOS has (or might has in certain scenarios) issues when operating on WPA2 encrypted Wifi networks. In this case meaning that Bonjour simply does not find any services or even does not search at all.

In the case of Reemote, this results in the reported condition – Reemote keeps searching for a server.

Workaround 

Since about every networked Application or device in the Apple world is using Bonjour, others seem to be facing similar issues. However, the only workarounds that appear to exist are to either not use Bonjour at all, or if one has to – not to use WPA2.

I can confirm that for me, switching from WPA2 only to WPA/WPA2 does solve all issues with Bonjour, leaving it rock solid and making all Applications relying on it work noticably  better.

However, I’d love to hear how it worked out for you! If you try this, sharing your experience would help a lot!

How to configure an Airport

1. Fire up the AirPort Utility 
2. You’ll see all of your AirPort’s listed, double-click the one that provides your Access Point.
3. A window will pop up, choose the Wireless tab and make sure Wireless Security is set to WPA/WPA2 as shown below.
4. After that, apply your settings – the AirPort will restart.
5. Also, it might be necessary to restart the Reemote App on your iOS device (by removing it from the app-switcher) before giving it another try.

Future options

To provide another workaround, future versions of Reemote will have the option to disable Bonjour and to manual provide of the server address instead.

This, as well as a fix for the previously reported Stealth-Mode issue will be included in Reemote 1.2.3 and ReemoteHD v1.1.1 – both shipping in the coming weeks.

If you have been experiencing crashes with the latest Reemote for Airfoil or Reemote HD, there probably is an easy way to fix this.

As a customer just discovered, Reemote is crashing if Airfoil is configured not to allow remote speakers to connect back to Airfoil.

How to fix ?

Simple, just open up the Airfoil preferences and make sure the option Connect to Airfoil is checked, as shown in the screenshot below.

There have been a few reports of Reemote taking forever to find the server and even then not operating properly.

As it turns out, this issue seems to be related to the Mac OSX firewall or more precisely it’s Stealth Mode option.

EDIT: This should no longer be an issue

So, what does this mean ?

First of all, I’d like to apologize for any inconveniences and thank everyone who has provided feedback and debug info – you are awesome !

Second, a fix is in the works already,and should be available in the coming days, an update for both of the iOS App will ship in 5-10 days depending on how long it takes for review.

In the meantime turning off the Stealth Mode option should serve as a workaround.

Here’s what to do

1. Go to System Preferences and select Security & Privacy

2. Click the lock on the lower left, then click Advanced…

3. Unselect Stealth Mode