Light dawns

After a slight change of tactic over the weekend, there has been some success with Elmo.
I decided to set aside the issue of decoding the infrared signals and switch to a set of IR codes produced by a third party. This led to some moderate success in controlling my satellite reciever. With a number of tweaks and tricks I was able to get moderate reliability of reception from the satellite box. I then went in search of some alternate codes and found a set which works very well with the box. The new set are actually decoded fully, rather than relying on the raw codes that the other file used - this looks like the way to go.

I then married my previous work with a socket server together with my infrared code and got to a point where I could issue commands on one machine and get the Linux box to send the appropriate IR codes. This is essential for the final solution since I don't want a display plugged into the Linux box.

I've not been able to find files for my other equipment so I'm back to trying to decode the IR signals in order to create my own config file. I'm hoping that the example file I already have will help in this process.

It's a good step forward, though, and has illustrated that the whole idea looks practical and achievable.

Close, but no cigar

A weekend of frenzied Elmoness has seen progress on both receiving and sending IR signals. My test programs can now do both, the only problem being that the two aren't compatible - codes recorded don't activate the equipment as expected. When I use the numbers captured by the real LIRC programs, everything is fine. Although frustrating, this means that the basic mechanisms are there, I'm just missing something on the reception side. I'm wondering about the sample frequency of the receiver (and transmitter).

My receive and record program can get consistent results and distinguish different buttons on the remote which is better than I've managed before. Transmit is cheating by using a program provided by the IR transceiver manufacturer.

If I can get the reception calibrated in line with transmission, the learning process I've come up with will work much better than the LIRC default one, which is rather long-winded. I'm hoping this doesn't prove too difficult, but only time will tell.

Hiatus

Elmo has been in hibernation for over a year now due to other commitments and loss of momentum. However the purchase of some new equipment has prompted me to start work once again.
I've finally fathomed out my problems with IR reception (down to my own misunderstanding of the protocol) and I've managed to recover the development environment to the point of building test code again. I've also spent some time learning about iOS programming.

I suspect progress will be slow since I'm away from home alot at the moment.

Having managed to receive some meaningful data on the IR device, my next step is to write a tool that makes some sense of the data in preparation for retransmission. I intend to focus on a single IR remote control for now and get to the point of being able to send a few simple commands. This should be reasonable simple, but with IR it never seems to quite work that way.

More news, as it happens.