powermate is a knob shaped device hooked up to PC via USB.
It has integrated blue LED and nice metalic body and most importantly, we can use it as a generic input device and control LED behavior freely.

Official supported platforms are Windows and Mac. But thanks to those who have written driver, we can also use it on Linux.

MPD is a descent challenge to build up own jukebox at home using PC.
It supports major compressed/uncompressed audio formats and has nice socket control interface.

powerTunes uses powermate as an interface to MPD.
It is capable of showing current playback status(play/idle/pause) of MPD and gets input from powermate and send it to MPD.

For example, when MPD is playing some song, LED pulses at a steady speed and when paused, pulse gets faster and when playback is stopped, LED is lit without pulse.
At a moment, powerTunes supports 4 inputs:

• play/pause - short click
• stop - long click
• next track - rotate clockwise
• previous track - rotate unti-clockwise

powerTunes requires PC running MPD and linux PC(can be the same one) connected to powermate.

You can download source code package here.
powerTunes has been developed and tested under following environment:

• i386 linux with 2.4 kernel
• MPD version 0.11.5