Pulse Eight CEC Won't Work

Farquea · January 20, 2017 at 2:51 AM

I have an Asus Chromebox running Kodi 17 with LE V7.90. I bought a Pulse Eight CEC adapter but cannot get it to work and wondered if someone could point out where i am going wrong or what might be my problem, assuming this should work?

I have my TV into a sony Sound bar which goes into a HDMI switch, then into my Chromebox. I powered down the Chromebox, plugged in my CEC adapter then power on and get nothing on screen, no signal. I've tried this plugging in the adapter to the usb before connecting the HDMI too. Also, the soundbar for some reason switches on and will be set to Optical input instead of HDMI. Do i need to configure anything?

I tried this a few weeks ago and actually got into Kodi and when configuring the CEC settings, it somehow completed wrecked my soundbar to the point where it would not display any video and i had to do a hard reset on it.

Is there any kind of basic setup guide of how to plug in and configure this that i could refer to?

**Klojum** · January 20, 2017 at 6:00 AM Official Post

CEC is one of those things that should work out-of-the-box.

I have to ask: Did you verify if CEC is fully enabled on your TV ?
Try to see if it works without any hardware in between your Chromebox and the TV.

My PulseEight USB adapter works here, although it does it without any AVR or Soundbar.

stbenz · January 20, 2017 at 2:30 PM

I had a similar problem with the Pusle Eight CEC adapter and my NUC (no signal). The problem was, that at the point where the NUC tries to negotiate with the TV through HDMI, the CEC adapter didn't have power through USB yet, so the negotiation failed and the TV showed "no signal". The resolution was to not deactivate power on USB ports while the NUC was off, so the CEC adapter is already powered when the NUC is startet.

Farquea · January 20, 2017 at 4:45 PM

I had my old raspberry Pi working in the same setup no problem but i'll have another go at it this weekend starting with cutting out the soundbar and hdmi switch and see what happens.

I also did know about the power issue and had intended to keep the chromebox always on so thats why i tried turning the chrome box on with USB plugged in first before connecting the hdmi cable but still couldnt get it to work.

Borromini · January 21, 2017 at 2:41 PM

Updating to the beta fixed it for me (CEC was indeed broken on the last alphas). Newer CEC library etc.

Farquea · January 21, 2017 at 10:25 PM

So i did get this working, kind of. I couldnt get my sound bar to return back to HDMI in each time it turned back on with the CEC Adapter plugged in for some reason so for now the solution is leave the soundbar always on.

Am i imagining this or is there a way for the TV to wake Kodi/Chromebox when i power on the tv so that i dont have to hit a key on my kodi remote to bring it out of Suspend mode?

stbenz · January 22, 2017 at 9:07 AM

Quote from Farquea

Am i imagining this or is there a way for the TV to wake Kodi/Chromebox when i power on the tv so that i dont have to hit a key on my kodi remote to bring it out of Suspend mode?

Yes, it's possible to wake devices with CEC in both directions. The Pulse Eight adapter will do this through USB when your TV sends a wake up signal.

Farquea · January 22, 2017 at 9:22 PM

Yeah for some reason this started to work. Apart from my soundbar consistently defaulting to optical instead of HDMI, this is all working now on the Kodi/Pulse Eight side