Hello,
I asked over in the setup forum about using an IR dongle to generate events / trigger scenes, but it hasn’t gotten much attention. I’m wondering if I will need to write a plugin to do this? I am a professional software developer and wouldn’t mind delving into this if necessary but I don’t want to duplicate effort if its been done before.
Anyone know of anything like this? If not, any tips on where to start? I assume that it would involve a) getting the dongle recognized and working under linux (looks like there is a project called lirc that has drivers) and then b) creating a plugin to handle it.
Perhaps most folks use Z-Wave controllers (handheld or in-wall), or native apps or the mobile browser GUI on their smart phones / iPods / iPads to interact with Vera. It seems kind of counter-intuitive to use IR if you can have RF or WiFi control.
At any rate, before looking at the SW side, what do you propose for HW? (Although that was probably part of your question.) As you need line-of-sight for IR, you’re probably not looking for just something that plugs directly into Vera, but rather an IR receiver that connects to your (wireless) LAN. Or a wireless IR repeater plus something that plugs into Vera.
And what do you propose as controller? Presumably an IR remote.
What do you propose Vera (your application) is going to emulate for an IR device, so that my remote is compatible with it? Do I just take an old remote, for a device I don’t use/have anymore, and make it the remote for Vera?
Did you do some searching for LIRC on this forum already?
First off thanks for looking at this and taking the time to get me straightened out.
[quote=“oTi@, post:2, topic:167784”]It seems kind of counter-intuitive to use IR if you can have RF or WiFi control.
At any rate, before looking at the SW side, what do you propose for HW?
And what do you propose as controller? Presumably an IR remote.[/quote]
I should have been more clear. I have a Universal Remote MX-880 and an RF base station that has an IR blaster on it. My home theater equipment is in the same closet as my Vera. The theory was that I could use the IR blaster to send commands from the remote to Vera to trigger scenes. The remote is programmable, so I already hit a button called “Watch TiVo” and it turns on the tv, sets up the receiver, turns on TiVo, etc. I want to be able to add a command to that macro on the remote to (eg) dim the lights.
I have a cheapo IR receiver from an MCE remote. It identifies as a “TopSeed Technology Corp. eHome Infrared Transceiver” in lsusb.
No, I hadn’t tried that, but its an excellent idea Last night I got as far as downloading LIRC to my Vera but I realized there is nothing like a development environment there so I wouldn’t be able to build the kernel modules (which makes sense now that I think about it, due to the extremely limited storage).
A quick look at the search results shows me some people have already got something like this going, I will look deeper.
Yesterday I started thinking about doing something very similar (attaching USB IR receiver to vera).
I have a Manta TR1 that I bought from a small company called Twisted Melon some years ago. I’ve been using it on my mac pro for about three years and its been working great. I have a few extra IR emitters lying around and the Manta TR1 has two plugs in the back for those. It looks like they are going for $19 right now, and if you don’t have an emitter that is another $5 or so (available on ebay or amazon). Seems like a cheap option for an IR transeiver. I’m very happy with mine, but as I said I’ve only used in on OSX. I will be testing this over the next few weeks myself. The linux device info, just in case anyone is interested, is:
{ 0x147A, 0xE015 }, // Formosa21 BB
I’m debating trying to build lirc for the Vera or just putting it on another OpenWRT/dd-wrt box (I have a few lying around!) and then just passing the IR communication over TCP/IP. I’m planning on doing something very similar with another OpenWRT box and the mochad package to add X-10 support (sending and receiving) on RF and PL. There are pre-built lirc packages available for quite a few different architectures from Openwrt. Not sure which one is appropriate… unfortunately i think it might be here which is one of the few arch’s missing lirc:
I’ll probably get lirc running on a different router first before (if?) moving it to Vera unless someone else gets around to building the package first.
Thanks! Anyway, @merit, this is just a long winded way of saying I’m very interested in any progress you make.
[quote=“radarengineer, post:8, topic:167784”]Thanks! Anyway, @merit, this is just a long winded way of saying I’m very interested in any progress you make.
-paridel[/quote]
It’s good to know someone else is interested and working on it I think you are correct about the OpenWRT platform and that lirc is not built for it. I’m not sure why, I was going to ask over on the OpenWRT boards but haven’t gotten around to it. I am also in the process of setting up an OpenWRT cross compile environment to try to build lirc myself.
I suppose I could also do the IR over IP thing. I have a windows home server box sitting right next to Vera that would probably work just fine, but I’m going to stick with trying to make this work directly for a little longer.
I’ll be sure to post back here if I get lirc to build. I’m a little concerned about getting the kernel modules to load, we’ll see how it goes…
Update: I got lirc built. The basic problem was that they are using the 2.4 kernel and the new version of lirc does not support it. I had to go back to an old rev of lirc (0.8.2) to get it to build out of the box.
I was able to get the kernel modules loaded (:o) and lircd running but haven’t gotten the user space tools going yet. So far though things are looking promising.
So I had to eventually give this up for two reasons:
Vera runs on kernel 2.4 and the LIRC driver I needed for my device (usb_mce2) only works on 2.6.
I realized that the dongle will only read microsoft media center IR codes. This is a problem for me because vera is next to a real PC running media center, so they would have conflicted.
Anyway if anyone wants the LIRC packages (and your device is supported in 2.4, which most are) let me know and I can post them.
Thanks for reminding me of this that linked to 325xi’s suggestion. Satellites to Vera would’ve been such a cool addition, a cheap wireless way to distribute IR and Serial, heck a possibly add usuable memory for Vera to use.
I don’t know if I would have any time for it in the near future, but having LIRC available would be very helpful anyway - can you share it somewhere, please?
I followed Merit’s lead and set up a build toolchain for Vera. It really wasn’t too hard - I just started with an Ubuntu install on a VM and followed the previously linked instructions on this forum and the howto on openwrt’s website.
Then I decided to just throw together a small Ubuntu server on an old Dell P4 I have sitting in the garage. The Ubuntu LIRC package supported my Manta TR1 MCE IR transceiver “out of the box”.
@merit, I don’t know about your MCE receiver, but mine can send and receive any IR code so I would double check and see if yours doesn’t too… I just had to edit my lircd.conf file and I’m happily controlling all my devices (Scientific Atanta Cable Box, etc).
I use a RF IR bridge. I have all my equipment in a closet in my home office, and run HDMI over cat5e and speaker wire through the attic to my living room.
Anyway, the point of all this is that with the MCE transceiver I can control all my equipment, but I can also “listen in” on commands that are send when I use a remote control. So eventually I plan on triggering events when I hit “pause” or “stop” in a movie (raise the lights?).
I also built mochad on the ubuntu box and hooked up my cm15a (refurbished about $15). I had to build mochad from source, but it was very straightforward. I only have a few X10 devices, but I am successfully receiving motion events from a MS16A motion detector (~$6 on ebay), a DS10A door/window sensor (<$2.50 on sale), and sending and receiving PL commands. My entire current investment in X10 is about $30.
My dell uses about 70watts so I might eventually move this to something smaller (a little atom?). However, right now I have full IR sending and receiving and full X10 (RF&PL and RF security) sending and receiving exported over sockets. I just need to figure out the best way to integrate this all into Vera.
I just mention the prices because I am trying to get some other people interested in messing around with these so we can share ideas. One example: I am going to take two DS10A’s and connect them to my washer and dryer. These will then signal when a load is done.
Bumping an old thread, but RadarEngineer was on to it I think. My harmony controls my living room media just how I want it, but I wish I could make some shortcuts to turn off all the lights and shut the blinds. Just one or two soft buttons would do the trick. I have a Raspberry Pi, that sits in my media cabinet with a MCE IR receiver connected to it. I wish I could figure out a way to get it to send an all lights on/off, dim living room lights, and open/close blinds command to my Veralite. I saw the XBMC plugin, but I don’t want it to be state based. I want to push a button on the remote.
