Hello all,

I am trying to set up a simple serial receiver that would work with my TV remote control . But I am stuck at one point and , although searched a lot through the forum, followed all basic and advanced recommendations, I must admit I can not make it workfor the moment

I have soldered the simple serial receiver from lirc.org on my VIA EPIA 800, taken care about the recommendations on the low supply voltage provided on those motherboards. So I am almost sure the hardware is working.

I then followed the wiki lirc howto (http://knoppmythwiki.homelinux.org/index.php?page=LIRCHowTo)
I have found my Sony remote control in the - excellent - remote config site from lirc.org (http://lirc.sourceforge.net/remotes/), loaded my lircd.conf at the right place.
but ... no way ! when I come to mode2 attempt : nothing reacts , as if I had nothing on the serial port

Here are my logs :



This link : http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=218890
makes me say that , even though the lirc_serial driver seems to be up and running, it should recognize a 'active low receiver', which is the case.

and for the rest :



And when I launch the lircd daemon, everything seems alright :


I have browsed a lot through google and found nothing.

Does anybody have any clue where I can do wrong ?
That would be great , I am so close to have my little magic box up and running !

Thanks

Hacen

Have you checked to see if the "serial" module is loading before the LIRC module? Have you checked to see if another COM device would work...say a serial modem with "minicom" or something? Also, have you probed the devices in your receiver ckt to ensure they're getting the right voltages?

The active-low versus active-high thing shouldn't matter for mode2, you'll see "stuff" get outputted either way, but you can override the autodetect with a module option I believe. There's a blurb about it in the LIRC documentation on the website somewhere.

-Mike

Hi Mike,

What difference between "serial module " and LIRC module ?
How to check which is first loaded ?

I dont have a serial modem to check the serial port. Do you know other devices that can be checked on the serial port ?

Yes , I have probed the receiver hardware and found that it reacted when exposed to IR (with my remote) : the DCD pin voltage drops around 1V as long as the volume key is pressed then comes back to 3.8V when released .

Also as I told , I have an external tunable voltage supply and so I can play between a supply of 6.5V or 4.5V.

Do you have more details about the "blurb" concerning the autodetect in LIRC ?

Thanks for helping

Hacen

Perhaps a couple of things to check:

As Mike suggested check with lsmod if there is a module loaded with the name "serial".

Do you see references to the serial ports in your dmesg output? Like:



Do you have such a line in /etc/modules.conf?:



Or do you know the setserial command is executed in another way before loading the lirc_serial modules? You can try this interactively first before finding a way to do this automatically at boot time.

Are you sure your receiver is connected to /dev/ttyS0 or is it /dev/ttyS1? If it is the latter, you'll have to specify more options to lirc_serial. modinfo lirc_serial should list the possible options.

Have you tried irw? This is a very handy tool to check if the /etc/lircd.conf is setup properly.

Does lircd actually run? It's not crashing for some reason after you started it?

Hi and thanks for your interest !

Yes, lirc_serial is loaded :



Yes, the serial port seems correct :



No , I dont have the reference to pre-install in /etc/modules.conf. But I have put the setserial and all necessary command lines in /etc/init.d/bootmisc.sh as recommended in the WiKi.

And I also even tried to run them interactively but no success.

I am not sure if my receiver is on ttyS0 or 1 . modinfo told me about interrupts and IO (0x3f8 or 0x2f8 is available).

and when I run modprobe lirc_serial , it says :



lircd seems to run , but I have read that it should not be started if you want to try mode2 or even irrecord. Even if I start it, irw does recevie anything and remains silent.

My problem is that I can see nothing coming from my receiver with tools like mode2 or irrecord.

Thanks again

Edit : problem resolved.
The bug was located on my receiver's hardware : swapped DCD and GND.
Resoldered it and it works.

Conclusions : my previous logs can be used as guides to help installing LIRC, even though there exists a perfect WiKi.
Also , now that it works , I can confirm the fact that the log message saying it recognizes an 'Active High receiver' means that the harware is not recognized. For me, it says now 'Active low receiver'.

Hope that helps.

By the way, I still have one little problem with my remote : it works fine but sometimes , when I press a key, it is as if I pressed it twice. I tried to change the config file and the 'repeat' field but does not change the problem.

If someone has a solution ....

hacen,
Did you manage to fix the repeating button problem?
I am having a similar problem with my system.

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Paul Turpie
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Oops,
I solved MY repeating button problem. I had thought the /home/mythtv/.lircrc file was linked to /home/mythtv/.mythtv/lircrc, but it wasn't.
So nothing I tried to change in ~mythtv/.lirc would make any difference because mythfrontend was using a different file.
I fixed it with
Then the repeat options I had set worked properly.

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Paul Turpie
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