Hi,
I'm looking for somebody with experience programming embedded linux boards for a project I'll be working on until december. I'm an industrial designer with some arduino experience, but to make it happen for real I'd need some help. Otherwise I'd have to "fake" it and it would be nice to finish it properly.
The project has to do with an internet radio and it will last until december. At this moment, with my arduino skills I'll need a computer either to stream the music from an API written in C or using AppleScript to control what do I want the computer to play. That's ok, but if somebody wants to join me, we can work together and build something more decent.
The hardware interface I have in mind is something very simple and it would send serial commands to the computer to do whatever it has to do. Play a specific uri, pause, volume change... The arduino can control the hardware interface and just trigger the actions to be done by the embedded linux board, that should be connected wirelessly to the wifi at home.
My main problem is that I have no Linux experience at all and I don't really know how complicated would that be. It might be something really simple for somebody that knows about it, or maybe is something not really feasible at all and I'm considering something impossible to do.
So, if there's anybody out there that has any experience with embedded linux boards and would like to know more about the project, please let me know so we can talk more about it. I'm not considering learning linux for that, I'd rather work with somebody that knows how to do it.
And well, once everything is finished, I'd love to release it under an open source license or maybe even build a few of them. It can be a really nice thing...
If you're interested, please get in touch! 
If the software for the internet radio on the linux board has a command line interface, then you could probably easily do this with some glue code written in Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP, Bash (please don't use Bash)...
All you would be doing is reading from the serial port (something like /dev/USBttyS0) using the script, and then based on what it receives from the Arduino (the commands), it would then pipe this data via the command line to the radio software to control it.
Pretty basic, or at least it should be, if I am reading you correctly.
The problem is that I've no idea on how to do that.. 
Do you think it'd be that easy to help me with that? Maybe we can talk on Skype and I can give you more details about it. I'm doing it in collaboration with a company and can't reveal much about it yet.
I'll send you my skype id via DM.
I am sorry, but I have other commitments to attend to, both personal and professional, that would prevent me from taking on another project. What I wrote, though, is likely what you are looking to do, and anybody with more than basic Linux skills should be able to whip something up...
Good luck.
I totally understand. And yes, the API works with a command line interface. It's exactly the way you understood it, just that I had no idea if it would be something too complex or not.
I will try to get in touch with somebody that can help out with that part and give it a try. Anyways, thanks for the info.
The level of complexity will mainly depend on what and how the commands are to be processed; from your basic description, though, I don't forsee the actual developed glue code as being too complex - you're basically opening the port, waiting for data, and when it arrives parsing it into command tokens, which are then interpreted and passed on as commands to the command line interface. A competent coder in a particular language should be able to whip something basic up in an hour or two; fleshing it out will take longer, of course.
if you just need something like a small wireless serial port for the arduino you could use a linksys wrt54g with a hacked firmware like dd-wrt or openwrt. its a small linux based box with alot of different mods you can do and all you need to connect it to the arduino is a few bits of wire. i currently have 1 setup with a project im doing right now witch is a wifi rc car with a few extra servos and sensors on it and so far it works great. if you or anyone is interested i can explain a how i have it setup and maybe get some pics up. it recives numbers as commands like so.
example of how i get the temp: <230>
and it will return the current temp. the < and > are the seperators
Thanks ABC-King. I had read about that router and also about the one from FON, laFonera, that is pretty cheap (30 euro I think) and can also be connected to the serial port of the arduino. However, that's not gonna work for the project I'm working on. It has to have audio output, otherwise I'll need a computer to play the streamed audio and I don't think any of those routers will have it.
I'll end up using something like that if I can't get the embedded linux to work, in that case just using bluetooth or xbee to send the commands to the computer would be enough. At least that would let me have a wireless working prototype.
Anyways, share the code, I'm sure somebody else will be happy about it!
this might be worth taking a look at