After getting my Myth box set up, I have been on a quest to improve the
WAF for my system. There have been many tweaks, but my "holy
grail" has been to get all the functions (both media center + TV + ...)
on to a single universal remote. I thought my objective was
within my grasp, but I've been thwarted once again and I'm hoping
somebody can provide me with a solution to my latest problem.<br>
<br>
First, a bit of background. I have a PVR-150 card. I got
the LIRC stuff going with the IR pickup that came with the card.
But, it only works with the Hauppauge supplied remote. I know in
theory I could probably get it to work with other RC-5 remotes, but
none of the codes I tried on my universal remote seemed to work.<br>
<br>
I tried making my own, but the voltages weren't right and I just didn't have the time to iterate on that thing.<br>
<br>
So I bought an IRA-3 from <a href="http://www.home-electro.com">www.home-electro.com</a> thinking my days of
screwing around were over. Sadly, I was wrong. The IRA-3
uses the IRMAN protocol, BTW.<br>
<br>
I hooked the thing up and tried to get it to work with the version of
LIRC already installed on my machine (0.7.1). No dice. I
couldn't seem to get anything. It kept giving me an error in
irman_init(). Crap. So I got the source to LIRC and tried
building it. No dice, same error. Because I could
initialize the device on my Windows machine, I didn't understand what
the problem was. I got the latest versions of LIRC and libirman
and tried to sort things out.<br>
<br>
After a considerable amount of digging and learning far more about
IRMAN, IR, LIRC and serial ports than I ever wanted to learn, I
eventually managed to narrow down the problem. While the IRMAN
protocol specifies 9600 baud, 8 data bits, no partity, no flow control
and 1 stop bit, the port initialization fails to actually specify one
stop bit (although it doesn explicitly handle all the other
parameters). I added one line to the initialization routine in
libirman (to set the stop bit to 1, something it should have already
been doing even according to the comments in the code) and low and
behold...it worked!!! My IRA-3 initialized and I started getting
data from it in the expected 6 byte chunks. Hooray!!!<br>
<br>
At this point, I thought I had finally conquered this stupid
issue. I rebuilt libirman and LIRC using the new initialization
code and I was well on my after running irrecord and building up a
.conf file for my remote.<br>
<br>
Then...disaster struck. After trying to use Myth with the new
remote it seemed like it was ignoring some of the key presses. I
went back into raw mode (using test_io in libirman to output the codes)
and it turns out that the stupid thing is spitting out multiple codes
for the same key. I don't mean it repeats itself (which it does,
but that is a different issue). I mean it gives a different code
sequence! God Damn IT!!!!<br>
<br>
The problem seems to be related to the history of key presses. As
I said, a single keypress send a duplicated code but that doesn't seem
to cause any problem. The real problem is when the codes
change. For example, running 'test_io', these sequences are for
the <span style="font-weight: bold;">same</span> key:<br>
<br>
<span style="font-family: courier new,monospace;">[29][14][7d][f7][5f][ff]</span><br style="font-family: courier new,monospace;">
<span style="font-family: courier new,monospace;">[29][14][7d][f7][5f][ff]</span><br style="font-family: courier new,monospace;">
<span style="font-family: courier new,monospace;">[2a][e8][4e][f7][5f][3f]</span><br style="font-family: courier new,monospace;">
<span style="font-family: courier new,monospace;">[2a][e8][4e][f7][5f][3f]</span><br style="font-family: courier new,monospace;">
<span style="font-family: courier new,monospace;">[29][14][7d][f7][5f][ff]</span><br style="font-family: courier new,monospace;">
<span style="font-family: courier new,monospace;">[29][14][7d][f7][5f][ff]</span><br>
<br>
WTF? I find that if I hit the same key repeatedly I pretty much
get consistent codes. But, if I jump around (e.g. LEFT, RIGHT,
Channel-UP, LEFT) that the same key (e.g. LEFT) will have different
codes.<br>
<br>
My hope is that somebody has some simple remedy (e.g. something simple
like turning on flow or changing the parity or something). By the
way, the Hauppauge remote works fine. But it only send 2 bytes?!?<br>
<br>
Any suggestions?!? I was so close. After having hacked may way
through all this to have it fail to read remote key signals reliably is
so aggravating!!!!!<br>
<br>
Any help would be greatly, greatly appreciated.<br>
<br>
--<br>
Mike<br>
<br>