CONTROL WINAMP USING MOBILE PHONE - BLUETOOTH

You can monitor your computer while you are away from it and it will cost you almost nothing. A smart phone that has either Bluetooth or GPRS and a small application that can be freely downloaded from the Internet is all you need to begin monitoring your PC.

This is a simple project that you can complete in less than 10 minutes. There are many applications available on the Internet that can help you monitor your computer using your mobile phone. The application we are going to describe allows you to control your computer from a mobile phone using Bluetooth. You can also find applications such as RemotePC2 that allow you to control your computerthrough the internet using GPRS on your mobile phone. RemotePC2 can be downloaded from ‘http://www.getjar. com/products/57007RemotePC2′ and it works with any J2ME-enabled mobile phone. We tried using it, but found that the performance was not impressive. Also, we were not able to use it over the Internet because we are behind a proxy server, and this application requires you to have a live IP. There are other Windows Mobile applications available on the Internet that you can use to control your computer using Wi-Fi. We hope to bring you that project in the near future.

The software and hardware requirements for this project are:

A Blue tooth Dongle

This can have a range between 10 to 100 meters, depending on your requirement and budget. A Bluetooth dongle that supports Bluetooth serial ports is preferable. We used an SMC Bluetooth dongle which is easy to configure and has a range of 10 meters. This will cost you around Rs 500. This, of course, is assuming your computer doesn’t already have Bluetooth built-in.

Any smart phone running Series 60 (S60) 1st and 2nd edition.

The application we used here does not yet support S60 3rd edition or phones that run on propriety operating systems, even if they are Java-enabled. We used a Nokia 6630 for this workshop.

Control freak symbian software

This can be downloaded for free from ‘http://mtvoid. com’.. This download contains the programs that you’ll have to install on your Windows computer and also the smart phone. We have used Windows XP for this workshop.Control Freak uses a Winamp plug-in to start the server. Winamp can be downloaded for free from ‘http://www.winamp.com’.

Winamp 2 or 5

Winamp must be installed on the computer before installing Control Freak.

COMPUTER:

Any computer that runs on Windows 2000 or higher and has a free USB port to support the Bluetooth dongle will do. A Bluetooth-enabled laptop will also be fine for this purpose.

The installation is quite simple. Just download Control Freak and save it on your computer. Double click the .exe file and keep clicking next. No configuration is needed. The application will place a ‘controlFreak.sis’ file on your desktop. This file is the client software that needs to be installed on your mobile phone. Install it through Bluetooth or through the software bundled with your phone. After installing it on the phone, a new item titled ‘CtrlFreak’ will appear in the applications menu. When the Control Freak PC application finishes installing, it will launch Winamp and the Winamp-plugin will try to configure itself automatically. If you are using your computer’s default Bluetooth drivers, no manual changes are needed. If you are using a Bluetooth device that requires installed drivers, you should select ‘Installed other’ as the Bluetooth driver. You then need to set the Bluetooth virtual serial port (also called a COM port which the plug-in will use to communicate with the phone application. This process is usually easy, but it varies depending on your Bluetooth software. An important thing to remember is that your computer uses separate COM ports for incoming and outgoing connections. You need to check your Bluetooth software and make sure that you are using the incoming COM port correctly.

Next, open Winamp and type the shortcut combination ‘Ctrl + F’. A window that displays the connection properties of the Bluetooth pops up .Set the Bluetooth driver as ‘installed other’ and choose the COM port you installed using Bluetooth, Select the ‘Startup with Winamp’ check box if you want the server to load every time you open Winamp. Click ‘OK’ to finish.

Now start the ‘CtrlFreak’ application on your mobile, choose ‘Options’ and select connect. The software will ask you to connect to the computer. Here you may have to enter a pass code on both the mobile and the computer to pair the device with your PC. Usually the pass code is ‘0000′. Once your mobile is connected to the computer, the display shows the current song playing in winamp. Choose ‘Options’ and select ‘Computer Desktop control (8)’ from the application menu. The moment you click on ‘Select’ the screen will display the same content that is being shown on the computer

You can access the computer from a distance of 10 to 100 meters depending on the Bluetooth dongle and phone you are using. The bandwidth may be affected if you have too many walls between your computer and the mobile.

You can watch full screen videos or view photographs by controlling your PC with your mobile. You can switch from normal screen mode to horizontal full screen mode, change the speed of the mouse cursor on the PC, or change the image type you receive from automatic to BMP or JPEG. You can also set how your phone disables remote. control when you receive a call. You can add, remove playlists, and even use the screen to show a Winamp-style spectrum analyzer while playing a song

You can also use this application to remotely (temporarily) use your computer while you are away from your desk at the office or to browse the Internet using your computer if you have a compatible mobile phone with a fairly large screen.