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.