[mythtv-users] Dish 311 IR Blaster (was: Re: MythTV and Satellite)

[Jesse Guardiani]

Mark J. Small wrote:
>>>   No risk of having the sat box
>>> "miss" the ir commands from the ir blaster (which rarely happens, but
>>> is
>>> possible).
>>>       
>> With my Dish 311 receiver it happens enough to annoy the heck out of my
>> wife. I've missed
>> enough of my own shows that I'd love to find a better way too.
>>     
>
> I used to get a lot of missed changes on my DCT2000, but I found that if I 
> used nice to raise the priority of the channel change script, it happened 
> MUCH less often.

Already doing that. I suspect part of my problem may be the home-built 
hardware. My soldering skills
aren't that great and the wire broke once before from setup/teardown 
stress so I had to resolder. I just
bought a professional ir-blaster from irblaster.info today. Perhaps that 
will help.

Has anyone had trouble recently with Dish 311 boxes not wanting to 
change channels in the morning?
My Dish 311 resets for updates every night at 3AM (really annoying). The 
only way out of the screen
saver after the update is the send the "SELECT" code, so I send this 
before every channel change.

My wife says that recently (last 2 weeks or so) the mythtv box can't 
change channels in the morning until
the Dish 311's physical remote is used to change the channel. After 
that, it works fine. She says that when
she tries to change the channel the Dish screen saver goes away and a 
channel starts playing, but she can't
make it change to another channel without using the physical remote.

So... since the normal Dish remote works 100% of the time, I'm thinking 
either the JVC codes I'm using
aren't accurate, or the lirc hardware isn't capable of reproducing the 
signals perfectly, or both. I'm using
the code file from here:
    http://losdos.dyndns.org:8080/public/mythtv-info/ledxmitd.conf
And my setup pretty much follows the howto here, with the exception of 
sending SELECT before each
channel change:
    
http://losdos.dyndns.org:8080/public/mythtv-info/MythTV_DISH_IR_LED_TX_via_Modified_LIRC.html

Any similar experiences? Tips?

Thanks!

-- 
Jesse Guardiani
Programmer/Sys Admin
jesse at wingnet.net