[mythtv-users] IR Blaster sadness

[Trevor Hill]

I haven't posted here in a while.  I had a MythTV box that ran flawlessly
for about three years with only minor updates until it gave up the ghost a
few weeks ago.  I broke down and bought almost a whole new set of parts
(motherboard, processor, hard driver, etc.) rather than trying to figure out
which of the parts on my old machine had failed.  Everything is going well!
Except for the IR blaster.  I have a motorola receiver (for StarChoice) and
a plain old RS232 IR blaster I got from irblaster.info.

The configuration looks okay -- I've followed the directions at
http://www.htpcug.com/blaster.htm.  When I try to run the change channel
script, I don't get any errors or weird log entries, but nothing happens.
The doubly strange thing: the LED on the blaster that is supposed to blink
when a signal is sent is on constantly from some point during the startup
process (I'm not exactly sure where) until I turn the machine off.  This is
obviously not normal. :)

I had it running on COM1 (IRQ4) at first.  After that didn't go very well, I
tried switching it to COM2.  When I'd changed the IRQ of the single serial
port in the BIOS but hadn't reconfigured the modprobe.conf yet, the LED on
the blaster obviously didn't come on for that reboot.  However, when I fixed
up modprobe.conf and rebooted again, we were back to the old situation: LED
on all the time, no signals being sent, no error messages.

Any ideas?  I've mostly ruled out lircd.conf and such being a problem as
that wouldn't cause the IR blaster to not send any signals at all, just send
the wrong ones.

My current modprobe.conf:

[snip]
alias char-major-61-0 lirc_i2c
alias char-major-61-1 lirc_serial
options lirc_serial irq=3 io=0x2f8
####IR setup####
install lirc_i2c /sbin/modprobe ivtv; /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install
lirc_i2c
install lirc_serial setserial /dev/ttyS1 uart none; /sbin/modprobe
--ignore-install lirc_serial
[/snip]

rc.local:

/sbin/modprobe lirc_i2c
/sbin/modprobe lirc_serial
/usr/sbin/lircd --device=/dev/lirc0 --output=/dev/lircd
/usr/sbin/lircd --driver=default --device=/dev/lirc1 --output=/dev/lircd1
--pidfile=/var/run/lircd1.pid


# ls -al /dev/lirc*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root     5 2008-03-21 20:23 /dev/lirc -> lirc0
crwxrwxrwx 1 root lirc 61, 0 2008-03-21 20:23 /dev/lirc0
crwxrwxrwx 1 root lirc 61, 1 2008-03-21 20:23 /dev/lirc1
srwxrwxrwx 1 root root     0 2008-03-21 20:23 /dev/lircd
srwxrwxrwx 1 root root     0 2008-03-21 20:23 /dev/lircd1


--Trevpr
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