IR codes file

zksHGItCVxPBhrEx7B9x · February 9, 2019 at 1:48 PM

On my Raspberry Pi / LibreElec I have activated the kernel IR device (gpio-ir), and plugged an ir receiver module into GPIO18. I checked it with irrecord, and it's working (means: dots are showing when I press a button on any remote)! By the way, LibreElec is a great piece of work, keep it up!

What I wanna do now is configure my programmable remote to be used with LibreElec.

While I have tried to understand the material on the LibreElec wiki (Infrared Remotes [LibreELEC.wiki]), I guess I must be too dumb to understand. It is not clear to me what is specific for LIRC and how it relates to gpio-ir and what problems are real problems and what problems are only problems to people who are coming from outdated information. What I would like to avoid also is pressing buttons for several hours just to teach the Pi something that has been done before.

I imagine that it is probably possible to just do the following:

1) download a file for the remote of some arbitrary device X (which I don't necessarily own, but which is reasonably well supported by the community)

2) put the file to some folder in my LibreElec installation, and finally

3) configure my programmable remote (Logitech Harmony One for those who are interested) to use device X

Am I on the right track?

**HiassofT** · February 9, 2019 at 2:34 PM

If you have a programmable remote - like a Harmony - the answer is rather simple: configure it as a Microsoft Media Center (MCE) remote and it'll work out of the box (you only have to add the gpio-ir dtoverlay to config.txt).

It's best to stay away from lircd.conf files, a lot of them out there on the 'net are semi-broken (contain invalid keycodes like "PLAY" instead of "KEY_PLAY" etc) and will cause you a lot of frustration.

so long,

Hias

zksHGItCVxPBhrEx7B9x · February 9, 2019 at 4:41 PM

Thanks for the tip. Now in hindsight I understand the MCE references in the wiki article a little better. I have programmed my Harmony One as "Microsoft Windows Media Center (EU)". But then, naively pressing some obvious buttons like Up/Down/Left/Right/OK did nothing.

Moreover I have repeated the irrecord test, and although the dots appear when I press buttons on the remote, the configuration file it writes contains all zeroes for the codes. Is "irrecord" the right tool at all for monitoring IR activity (in the new gpio-ir scenario...)?

I might also dig out my oscilloscope, but I expect nothing else to learn from this but that the sensor works (like it has done in the past when connected to an Arduino).

Is there another tool where I can check the raw codes the Pi thinks it sees coming from the IR receiver?

zksHGItCVxPBhrEx7B9x · February 9, 2019 at 4:43 PM

BTW, the sensor is TSOP31238, a 38kHz Sensor. I guess this has to work with MCE remotes.

zksHGItCVxPBhrEx7B9x · February 9, 2019 at 4:53 PM

Now it works! Don't know why. I just re-enabled CEC (because I thought it might be related to the problem) and rebooted once again. And after that everything worked.

Even after disabling CEC again it still works (I'd have been surprised if not...)

Thanks for the help.