Does anyone has any idea what interface USBUIRT uses to interact with the system?
Is it a serial device?
I’m dreaming of somehow connecting a number of USBUIRTs to Vera remotely, to control all AV equipment in all rooms…
You will be able to. We’re just waiting to get the usbuirt driver (which is closed source) compiled for the mips platform.
Could you shed some more light on this? How it’s going to work?
I mentioned “proxy” and “remote” - I’m looking for a way to control USB-UIRTs connected to other networked devices: another openwrt router (!), PC, etc.
So, driver is there now - is there a way to place on another openwrt device and make it talk to Vera?
USB_UIRT is natively supported in LIRC, which is Open Source. Even older versions of LIRC had a patch to enable UIRT… There are plenty of pre-built IPKs for LIRC floating around, but they may not have UIRT enabled, so it’s better to build your own.
Just plug the USB UIRT into Vera. Then go to Devices, Infrared, New IR device. Choose the type, manufacturer, model and pick the IR codes that work. That creates the device. To create a remote to control it, go to Scenes, Add a scene, click Add Remote, and create remote. Then upload a jpg or png file that’s the same size as whatever you want to use as a remote control (iPod, etc.), create the hot zones around the buttons, and add the commands to the zones. Save your remote, and add it to the scene. Save your changes. Go back to the remote and match up the commands to the i/r device. Then when you go into the smartphone app and select the scene you’ll see the remote on your phone and it will control the TV. This is very new stuff, and we’re going to do a full wiki/walkthrough asap, but that’s the general idea.
That’s cool but the original question was about something similar to serial proxy - i.e. without plugging USBUIRT into Vera, but rather into something actually located in the room with TV.
Unfortunately you can’t do this with the USB UIRT because it’s not treated like a serial device. Rather, we get a closed-source binary driver from the manufacturer that directly talks to the device–we didn’t implement the serial protocol (which would work over proxy) we instead talk to the driver.
Which means GC100 is the only option to do IR in rooms others then where Vera is located?
So we’re back to those ancient X10 IR pyramids?
Still waiting for my cheapo USB-Extender to ship from the folks in Hong Kong… Will let you know when it arrives (Monoprice still doesn’t list an availability date, so I tried eBay)
It’s still wired, like a GC100 (original) is, but if it works, it’d be simple and cheap.
I have about 8 Wi-Fi access points (mainly Asus routers and Squeezeboxes) all over the house… no wires
yeap, so your options are:
[ul][li]Continue with the ASUS units, but buy a boat-load of GC100’s ($$$)[/li]
[li]Wait until Global Cache releases their WiFi iTach versions and roll the dice with 802.11b, and eliminate the ASUS.[/li]
[li]Wire the important parts of the house, and hopefully the USB-extenders work (to be tested)[/li][/ul]
… the GC100 is not the only option but with the USB-UIRT having a close-source, non Serial protocol, driver you’re not going to be able to “extend” it over anything.
As a side-note, having gone from a Wireless apartment, to a Wired (2x per room) house, I’m kicking myself for not wiring the old apartment… it’s just so much cleaner and faster for the household (perm) devices. Lucky there are no masonry walls to chase.
“It just works” is true for the hard-wired bits of my Network 8)
I still hold out hope for the “wired” USB-Extended option, esp in the light of the news here.
Are you sure sending USB extender signal over the same wires won’t interfere with Ethernet?
different wires… Each room has 2 Cat5 cable runs, and these all pull back to a structured Wiring closet. The “Extender” will use one of these runs, and the other will remain Ethernet.
It’s not USB-over-Ethernet, it’s USB-over-Cat5… which is why the adapters can be made cheaply, since they only support USB1.1 data rates etc. This should be fine for what I want to hang off the end (a small Hub, a few USB-Serial Adapters and eventually a USB-UIRT).
Time will tell if there’s cross chatter between the two separate runs, and whether the solution will work (just waiting for my eBay delivery from Hong Kong to test it)
Quite frankly, I just don’t understand why MCV don’t consider Vera extenders. This is 21st century out there, and this kind of things got to be distributed this or other way! The original LinuxMCE presumes having extenders (the media directors), even Windows media server uses extenders build by Linksys, DLink, and others. It’s just Vera that prefers not to take an advantage of this concept.
And it’s easy too: they already have OEM supplier for Vera hardware, so get the lesser Asus from the same source, flash it with the same image of OpenWRT with just few pre-set enhancements for serial and IR, possibly USB webcams - and sell it as Vera Extender!
For remote USBUIRT it’s all about a simple wrapper/daemon that would merely pass whatever Vera communicates to the driver over network. Not a rocket science.
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Have you heard? The whole Windows media extenders concept is being slowly and painfully killed by M$…
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It’s definitely not a rocket science, but surely takes time and effort.
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And I don’t agree with the statement that drivers for USBUIRT are closed sourced. Of course, the hardware is not standard, the API is not documented or open, but it’s been out there for some time. As I mentioned earlier, the support for it (i.e. drivers) is in LIRC already… That means the source code is available, although it may have been reverse-engineered and not coming from the original maker of USBUIRT, but it works.
For those interested, the key elements of the source are available in places like:
http://code.google.com/p/ribsu/source/browse/trunk/ribsu/uirt-raw2.c
(the mac version, but near enough)
That said, it seems to be using the FTDI in “raw” mode, so not really simple to “proxy” that to a remote location without a bunch of legwork. You can see why Ser2Net would have issues with remoting it.
It’s not really about how much legwork it requires, but rather whether it will sell, and pay off that legwork.
I think it would, given it would replicate 80% of gc100 functionality plus some added flexibility of connecting more USB devices via USB hubs - at much lesser cost and open source upgradable and expendable firmware.
And answering to the old concert that MCV don’t want to spread thin - this would be integral part of Vera ecosystem, not some principally new and unrelated product.
Price wise, it would likely be a wash to most consumers (compared to the newer components from Global Cache for 130-160):
USB-UIRT - $50-55 + Shipping
ASUS Router - $45 + Shipping (on a good day)
The look on the wife’s face when the Remote Control doesn’t work, and you’re rebooting the router, Priceless 
I agree there’s a market for someone to build a Consumer-grade alternative to GC-100’s (or the newer replacements) with more functionality, but I’m just not convinced folks are going to worry about saving $30-60 to get a “home brew” solution here. If a vendor steps in, they’ll easily fill the $$ gap in the above equation just to add the support factor.
I don’t have a GC100, but the notion where it really “just works” has a lot going for it, it’s just not quite what I want in a single-box solution.
I like to tinker with hardware, like others here, but there are times it’s not worth the return, or aggravation to the folks that’ll use it daily.
eg. “Why doesn’t the light go on when I press this button”
connecting more USB devices via USB hubs
This is part of the problem, if you advertise “remoting” a USB Hub, then users expect every USB device to work (similar to this ZWave stuff we’re in now). If you don’t, then you’ll limit yourself to being a simple extension of Vera (with similarly reduced market op)
I’ve yet to see any Mass-Market [or OpenSource] projects doing this so you’d be working from scratch in proxy’ing the underlying protocol elements of USB.
The other, consumer oriented, approach would be native Vera support for the OpenWRT UWB drivers. Then you could buy the off-the-shelf UWB Wireless USB extenders, and it would be transparent. Not cheap, but transparent, and multi-node, and wireless without the big boxes everywhere.
What makes it less reliable then Vera itself? Same concept, isn’t it? It would be just as “home brew” as Vera too. I’m talking about taking a standard hardware and flashing it with one well tested FW image.
I also mentioned I see it as “Vera Extender”, not USB hub or whatever else. The fact you can connect more compatible USB devices using USB hub is the advantage over limited amount of ports on gc100.