Thread: Timetrax XM and Sirrus USB PC PCR control

Mitchjs (maker of the interface hardware on this thread: Sirius Usb Interface ) told me he'll send me one of his hardware interfaces (should be available for sale soon) so I can develop support for it.. I'll buy a SIR-ALP1 receiver with donation money for development ... hopefully we should get this going pretty soon...

For those waiting for this.. I've got a few updates:

-I got an interface card from Michjs (author of a USB->Serial interface)
-Bought a SIR-ALP1 from ebay (received today)
-Plugged it all in
-Subscribed for service
-Got the device activated and working perfectly
-After 10 minutes or so, the signal went out, turned it off, back on, worked for another few seconds and stopped again. Since then I have been unable to get it to receive Sat signal again -- even went out on my car with the antenna on top and laptop plugged in to see if could get anything but it just won't get any signal.

The Unit works, I can send/receive messages to it, so I can still work on a few basics, but I am unsure I can get a replacement for it (although it was brand new -- but still an ebay sale).. sounds to me like the antenna is bad (since th receiver still talks).. but I am really unsure of it or why that would be the case.

I have most of the code already written, just need to work on parsing the messages from the receiver (and that's where I need sat signal).. If anybody can provide me with ANY sirius connect box & antenna (since they're all the same on the tuner side), this could speed up things quite a bit since I'm really unsure of how things will turn out about replacing my current unit. I CAN RETURN THE UNIT AFTER DONE WITH DEVELOPMENT. I was really hoping to get everything done this weekend, but without a unit 100% working that won't happen..

Well, I coudn't contain myself.. so I went to BestBuy and bought a $100 Kenwood receiver (all receivers work the same, just the silver bottom of the box (not used) that has different cables/connections for different players).. something happened to the Alpine receiver that it just won't get signal.. The kenwood is working fine and I am doing good progresss with the integration... I just have to figure out how to "repair" the alpine one.. Sirius keeps throwing me to alpine (doubt they have anything to do with it) and the ebay seller hasn't responeded me (at least yet)..

Guino will RR be able to run XM and Sirrus or will you have to choose one or the other?

It CAN run Both... but, right now, one at a time -- that is, you can switch beween sirius and XM much like you can switch between FM and XM (or MP3 and XM, etc)..

The only things missing on the SIRIUS support now are:

-Station Art support (is anybody willing to make some transparent GIFs for this ??? PLEASE !!)
-Favorites list management (just like there's for XM -- mostly done)
-Reload List function

Other than the above, everything is working... Sirius has a few things lacking when compared to XM:

-Song/Programming TIME information -- it is not possible to display the total or current time of the song or programming.
-It is not possible to poll specific channels for Artist/Title information (like you can on XM).. There are functions to do it, but they only work after the receiver has "filled up" the the stations information (that happens automatically). This is only awkward when starting the receiver, because you basically have to wait for it to update the stations, and once they update, they are kept up to date very nicely for ALL stations at once (so it counter balances the fact XM doesn't do that).
-The Sirius tuner is WAY SLOWER than the XM tuner. It can easily take a few seconds for it to tune into a station... it is faster to change stations to close by stations than to change stations farther apart.. (i.e. changing from 1 to 2 is not very long, but from 1 to 160 or vice versa, takes a few seconds -- this is a hardware limitation).

I am studying the possibility of leaving the SIRIUS tuner ON (in the background) so it handles faster when switching into "SIRIUS mode". This would help keep song information up to date when playing MP3s and such -- but could affect performance if not done right (although not much) ..

Will these work for your art

It is hard to get them right for both black and white background


test

Originally Posted by Chuck

Will these work for your art
It is hard to get them right for both black and white background
test

Those should work fine... there's a PDF channel list on the non-flash version of the sirius website that has nice scalable resolutions for the Station Art images (just in case you're getting them from somewhere else). The size is pretty good and the transparency is ideal..

Thanks for your help, those few you made will already help me on testing..