...stuff I do and things I like...

Wednesday, November 02 2005

btslides: use a Bluetooth headset to navigate slides

a long story, yesterday night while preparing a presentation (I had to give today) I had this idea of using my Bluetooth headset for navigating through my slides. Actually the idea is not new, there already is a Windows application to do this - but of course I wanted this for Linux. I actually just remembered how small the btsco code (thats the user land part of the bluetooth-alsa project) is and that it just reads AT commands. So it should be easy to hack something together. I went to work after finishing my presentation. It turned out to be a real fast and nice hack. After giving my presentation, using btslides, I wrote to the bluez-devel list to ask about integration...

Now here is epox-presenter-0.3.tar.gz with support for generic bluetooth headsets. The Epox-presenter was original written by Marcel Holtmann, the core maintainer of BlueZ.

The generic headset support is able to generate two different key press events. By default these are left and right for up and down. The key events can be changed to control different applications.

Please try, feedback is more then welcome!