As you can probably tell from the subject line, what I've got is a serial port homebrew receiver and transmitter on the same serial port (ttyS0). Here's the problem:

Running lirc-reconfig.sh, telling it what I have, rebooting, and only the receiver will work- meaning I can control myth with my remote no problem, but my dish won't change channels. If I go to /etc/init.d/ and chmod ugo-x ./lirc (so the receiver side doesn't go), then the irblaster will work fine- but of course I lose my receiver functionality.

This is driving me nuts. Does anybody have an idea how I can fix this? On the old hardware I compiled an alternate lirc and ran two instances on different serial ports. Messy, but it worked. On this hardware I only have 1 serial port, so that option is out.

Hi,

Question: Did this ever work previouly or is this a new project?

As a tip that may be of value, since it is serial, you may need to put a no echo command on the tty string other wise what you send out would be also received and resent ... gets messy but bottom line would be is it wouldn't work.

Also, I have been looking for the "best" version of homemade serial ir device, Do you have a link for yours or maybe share the circuitry diagram? I am thinking that as folks add tuners to their backends that they will end up with an excess of remotes that could be further used on frontends.

Thanks
Mike

New project, but this has been documented to work. iguanaworks.net, for example, sells one.

Thanks for the tip! Fortunately, I won't need a 'no echo' because the blaster is in the A/V closet with the equipment, and receiver has been strung up to the front of the room.

http://iguanaworks.net/

They've got a schematic up for the serial transceiver.

Mine is made up of a radio shack IR receiver, an IR diode, and a resistor. Oh, and some wire. I didn't even put the voltage regulator on mine. But it does the trick, and I think it cost me $5 to cobble together.

If I understand correctly, you have a single serial port and want it to be both a receiver and a transmitter. You used to have two different serial ports with a lircd running on each one, one lircd which receives, and another lircd which transmits.

Maybe you can change the channel change script so that it will stop the receive lircd, start a transmit lircd, run the channel change script, stop the transmit lircd, and start the receive lircd.

Yep- you got it, and yeah, that'll work for channel changing- but one of the devices I blast to is my receiver (I blast the same signal to both the dish 301 and the receiver, and one just ignores the other's commands). Volume is a tall order.

Right now this looks like some homework on my part- I know I can make it work, but I'm afraid of what I'll break in the process.

So what I plan on doing is stripping all of the current lirc stuff out, downloading the latest and recompiling with the appropriate options. If anybody has an easier way, please let me know!

This should just work. All you need to do is append the lircd.conf that is for your remote and the lircd.conf that is for the device that you are blasting. The one instance of lircd should handle things fine. I have this setup on one of my diskless FEs.

I thought it should- being that the lirc-reconfig script seemed to accept that possibility.

If I set it up with both enabled, the receiver works great but the blaster gives me this when I try to send something:

/usr/bin/irsend: could not connect to socket
/usr/bin/irsend: connection refused

I'll try to lirc-reconfig again I guess.

After a little more prodding- I did the lirc-reconfig.sh which rewrote all my configuration files with the ones from a hauppage remote. At any rate, it gave me the same results.

I ssh in there from a nearby laptop and give it:


Which of course stops lircd

When I do the same for irblaster, it tells me there's no irblasterd running. Hmmm.... Well I do a /etc/init.d/irblaster start and the irblaster works great. Then I give it a /etc/init.d/lirc start and everything seems cool- the lirc receiver seems to be working (I need to verify this) and I can change channels from my ssh command line. As soon as I restart mythbackend and frontent, and it grabs onto the lirc receiver, irblasterd gets kicked (I'll do some research to define this better but the wife is watching at the moment) and no longer works.

Base on the name in the irblaster files, I might be talking to the right person.

Thanks,

Dave

If they are on the same serial port, you should not be using irblaster. what is the exact irsend command that you are using?

Ah ha- I think we may have found the issue- at work right now, but I'll remove the irblaster from rc.d tonight. I may be jumping to conclusions, but I think its there because I missed the homebrew serial for receivers in the initial setup, but DID get the irblaster which created an /etc/init.d/irblaster and lirc-reconfig doesn't remove it so its now messing things up.

Meanwhile, this is the irsend commands that I've tested with (one is directly from channel_change.sh)



For testing from the command line I'll usually give it this:


If its working I'll get a channel up and no errors. What I'll try tonight is eliminating irblaster from rc.d and checking /dev/ to see if there's still a irblasterd there. If not, I'll make a symbolic link to lirc or lirc0, or maybe just point my channel_change.sh script to the right place.

I'll report back. Thanks for your help so far.

I have a DIY serial LIRC setup I made. My is on one serial port and does both TX and RX. It has been a long time since I set it up, but I do not load irblaster. My send command in my channel change script looks like this:



Which sends the "ENTER" command to the defined remote. For testing I use:



Let me know how I can help.

Alrighty- still at work, but ssh'd home and reinstated lirc (also did an update-rc.d -f irblaster remove).

Also changed the irsend line of my channel_change.sh script to omit the --device directive completely (which means it sends to the default, based on a ps aux is /dev/lirc0).

Rebooted just to make sure all this would work from a boot, and it all looks good. I can't verify from here that the channel is *actually* changing but at least its not kicking an error.

I'll verify tonight, and report here.

Oh- in case it helps anyone, my dish301 starts a screensaver if it doesn't get any remote commands for like 6 hours, and requires a 'select' to continue normal operation. To deal with this, I made my channel_change.sh script always send a 'select' and a 0.7 second wait before the other stuff.

Thanks again!

Dave

Actually the irsend sends to the lircd socket, so by default it would be sending to device /dev/lircd which is created by the lircd daemon.

The irblaster.sh script should only be user to setup a blaster where you have another non-serial based remote controlled by lirc. The irblaster stuff runs another copy of the lircd daemon (named irblasterd) which creates a lircd socket called /dev/irblasterd.

Yes- this was it. Got rid of irblaster in rc.d, eliminated the --device directive from my channel_change.sh script and everything worked.

Note that the conf. file for your remote should be catted into the one in /etc/lirc

Meaning that you should go in there and edit out the hauppage configuration (if your remote is not a hauppauge), then cat /usr/local/share/knoppmyth/whateveryourremoteis/lircd.conf >> /etc/lirc/lircd.conf. The .conf for the blaster is not held in /etc/irblaster anymore. This is set up correctly by lirc-reconfig.sh, just don't completely overwrite your /etc/lirc/lircd.conf when setting up your receiver.

That's for both transmit and receive. I did a cp instead of a cat before I realized the mistake. Now I've got configurations for 3 remotes in there- 2 that I blast to, and one that I receive from. It works great.

Thank you guys very much for the help.

Dave