I fought I.R. and ... I won

My previous assessment of interfacing directly to the IR device was, surprisingly, confirmed this weekend.

Due to the glorious weather this weekend, I didn't have a great deal of time, but I managed to take the basic code I'd written in the week, port it onto the Linux box and successfully transmit codes to the Sky box (the digit 1). Having done that, with some more work I managed to capture IR from the remote control and confirm the numbers I was capturing matched those I'd previously sent. The trickiest part was getting all the data in the correct format since it doesn't seem to be consistent for different messages.

The upshot of all this is that Elmo can now capture IR signals from a remote control and regurgitate them to control devices (so far, only the Sky box). LIRC, the bane of my life, has been abandoned and I'm communicating directly with the IR device driver via a pipe. Initial indications are that the codes captured are very consistent.

I've taken the time to capture codes from 4 different remotes so I can work out the best way to analyse and store the codes - which is the task for this week whilst I'm away from home. If I can get a reasonable mechanism to do this then the most difficult part should be over. It's taken a very long time to get this far!

Next step: Analyse the captured remote codes and decide on the best way to record and store them. Write some code to support this, ready for porting to Linux at the weekend.