CCCKC: PianoBar Player

Long night here at the cave, but Phillip Dorr and I built a PianoBar player. PianoBar is a command-line player for Pandora, written by Lars Braun. The unit is an old thin client sporting 533MHz Via C3 and 256MB PC133. Compile options make a big difference for this little guy. GCC does have a Via C3 CPU model, but doesn't do instruction scheduling for it. We found that with -O3 -march=pentium-mmx we were able to reach only 30% CPU usage, whereas the default -O2 took 40%ish. I suspect this is because pentium-mmx has an instruction scheduling model that matches the C3 better than no scheduling + 3dNow instructions.

Here's what it looks like:

Currently the box lies out of the way, with only a keyboard hanging out.

We hope to create a new controller by using an arduino that can appear as a USB keyboard, like the UNO.