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.

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.