One Small Step

After some cries for help to the manufacturer, I've finally made some progress with the IR.

Reconfiguring LIRC (again) has finally let me successfully record and then retransmit IR signals to my Sky box. A small, but significant step forward.

I've discovered that recording things in raw mode seems to work OK - where the software doesn't try to work out the coding scheme being used but just regurgitates the codes as it captures them. This is a bit of a relief, as it makes the process a little simpler.

Having got LIRC working, I can now go back to my custom software and see where I can get with that. This isn't easy, but at least I'm making progress again.

Frustration - again

Things have not progressed much since the initial flurry of activity.

I have still not been able to get anything useful when capturing IR. The probable answer came today when I discovered that LIRC is still using the in-built IR receiver, rather than the one in the Iguanaworks stick. I think this means that the driver gets a bit confused about the signals it's getting.

I think I need to rebuild LIRC and convince it to do what I want it to, but that might be quite a task, given the lack of decent documentation and my inexperience with Linux. In the meantime, I can't really progress much further, since 2 way communication is quite important in this respect.

Signals

After a fair few hours of fiddling and trial and error I finally succeeded in transmitting IR from the transceiver today. I was able to turn a sky box on and off. A small, but significant step.

The downside of this is that I can only get it to work with previously created configuration files. When I try to record the IR signals myself and play them back, they don't work. Something isn't working quite right, but I'm not sure what. From my research, it seems that getting LIRC to control appliances is quite a tricky thing to do, so I don't feel too disheartened.

On top of this partial success, I'm also getting to grips with the LIRC codebase. I'm not especially impressed with the quality of much of the code, however, but it should hopefully help with trying to work out what's happening with the IR signals.

Light work

Getting the new IR Transceiver to work didn't prove too difficult - a bit laborious because it needed a rebuild of LIRC to get it to recognise the hardware, but it pretty much sprang to life after that.

What's proving more difficult it getting the transmit function to work. Receive seems straightforward enough, but getting something meaningful OUT of the device is rather more complicated. I suspect it's going to mean delving into the depths of some arcane code and a fair bit of trial and error - but if I can get this bit right, it'll set me on the right road for everything else that is to come.

At last

At last, the IR Transceiver from Iguanaworks has arrived. This is the last item in my initial batch of orders and sets me up with everything for phase one.

I've done a bit more work on the network comms side and started to write a simple protocol library to wrap the network interface. I'm trying to make all the utility code cross-platform so I can reuse it on the client and the Linux server. There's a fair bit of hardcoded stuff in there at the moment, but I'm not worrying because I need to get everything working together before worrying too much about maintaining the code!

I feel things are really starting to move - at last.

Network up

After a couple of afternoons of playing around with some samples and writing a few dozen lines of code, I now have a very basic network interface up and running.

I have a Win32 console client now talking to my Linux server across TCP and have a mechansim to handle the tricky things like setting the session up and tearing it down. This is very much prototype code, but the techniques are sound and it now means I have an IR receive interface as well as a WiFi transmit and receive.

Things must be going well as I even turned down going to the cinema this afternoon to work on the software.

Foundations

It's been a busy few days in the world of ELMO. After finally getting everything up and running I've been able to play around with LIRC and decide that most of it isn't much use to me. I've managed to recycle some of the code and find out how to do a few things and I now have a program which can recognise IR signals and do some interesting things with them, which is good.

I'm soon going to be held up because I've still not had my IR hardware from Iguanaworks (got to chase them AGAIN).

In the meantime, I'm starting to look at some other comms things and also at the network stack. It will soon also be time to decide on some specifics how phase 1 is going to work.

Small steps

I've managed to dedicate some time to the project today and finally have the infra-red reciever up and running. I've managed to get LIRC running and recognising some IR signals.
I've also started to write a (very basic) program to interface into LIRC but have run out of time before its fully working. I did expect to be in this position about a month ago, but at least it's progress.

A New Start

The platform is finally up and running and so this evening I took the opportunity to set the system up in a semi-permanent location and to install the basic development tools onto it. After 2 months of troubleshooting I was able to write my first program on the platform.
What was the program? Hello, World of course!