I have two IRblaster set up on my system. One uses the output from the PVR150 to control Verizon's Motorola set top box. No problem with that.

I also have a serial IRBlaster that controls an identical set top box for my other tuner. Everything works fine with it except it will not send a zero. If i try to change to channel 60, it changes to channel 6 instead.

Now here is what makes it even weirder, the PVR150 blaster work with no problem at all. I even tried copying the blaster part of the lircd.conf (codes used by the PVR150) over to irblasterd.conf but still it will not send a zero.

The box systems to be working fine and accepts zeros from its own remote.

Any ideas?

_________________
LINHES 8.6.1 BE/FE - MSI K9N6SGM-V with AMD A64 X2 4600+, 4GB Ram. 1.5TB WD. HDHR Prime. Nvidia GT210. MCE remote.
FrontEnd - Dell Vostro 400 3.0GHz Core2Duo NVidia GeForce210. MCE Remote

(Edited a couple times to add help items...)

I have seen this problem myself using a keyboard when in one
of the setup screens, but channel changing works fine, so it is
not entirely a LIRC issue. This is usually an issue when I am in
one of the setup screens.

<<< Workarounds for setup screens but not channel changing >>>
One way to get around it is to just press Enter (keyboard) or
Select or OK (remote) to bring up the on screen keyboard.
You can enter 0's just fine by pressing the 0 key on the "on
screen keyboard".

Another way I have gotten around it is to use copy (Ctrl-C or
Ctrl-Shift-C) of text from another window and paste (Ctrl-V
or Ctrl-Shift-V) to the mythtv setup window.

I am often VNCed in from an Ubuntu or Windows box so I can
use the keyboard anyway. When what I want to enter has a
zero in it I just pop up an xterm, type what I want, copy it,
and go over to the MythTV window and paste it.

<<< Test channel changing to see if it is LIRC or MythTV >>>
(the problem is MythTV on my boxen)
Bypass LIRC for a test by attaching a keyboard and using it.
If it works from the keyboard, then the problem is in LIRC
somewhere as you have bypassed LIRC but are still using
IRBLASTER.

By the way, some (all?) setups of IRBLASTER actually use
/etc/lirc/lircd.conf, not /etc/irblaster/irblasterd.conf.

You may want to check the difference between 0 and the other
numeric keys in /home/mythtv/.lircrc which is a symlink to
/home/mythtv/.mythtv/lircrc to get the channel changing to
work.

Also, if you created your /etc/lirc/lircd.conf yourself it is a
real possibility that the 0 key is just messed up.

Cliff

Cliff,

I am not real clear on what you are suggesting. How do I replace the IRblaster or LIRC with a keyboard. First of all I am sure that my STB is working as I can send a 1 and a zero to it using the original STB remote and I get channel 10.

As I mentioned it also works with the PVR150 IRBlaster with no problems at all. Shouldn't the irblasterd.conf have the same codes as the PVR150's blster section. In my case they don't.

Any ideas?

_________________
LINHES 8.6.1 BE/FE - MSI K9N6SGM-V with AMD A64 X2 4600+, 4GB Ram. 1.5TB WD. HDHR Prime. Nvidia GT210. MCE remote.
FrontEnd - Dell Vostro 400 3.0GHz Core2Duo NVidia GeForce210. MCE Remote

What model is your cable box? I have a Motorola DCT-700 and my irblaster will not send zeros either. I searched the internet and found many other people with the same problem. Apparently, the DCT-700 cannot detect a zero sent by a serial IR blaster. One work around is to use a channel change script that avoids zeros. For example, the script would tune to channel 59 and then send plus one channel code to tune to 60. That works for me. If you need a link to a script, let me know.

Yup, its a DCT-700. I just finished reading up on a few dozen posts from different forums complaining of the same thing.

Mark, if you would be willing to share your channel change script it would be appreciated. Does yours take care of channels greater then 100 or only up to 90?

The interesting thing is that my PVR150 is controlling another DCT700 with no problems. How is it that the PVR150 can send zeros but not the serial IRBlaster?

_________________
LINHES 8.6.1 BE/FE - MSI K9N6SGM-V with AMD A64 X2 4600+, 4GB Ram. 1.5TB WD. HDHR Prime. Nvidia GT210. MCE remote.
FrontEnd - Dell Vostro 400 3.0GHz Core2Duo NVidia GeForce210. MCE Remote

I actually just got my DCT-700 set-up last weekend. So this was a new problem for me as well. I used the "perl" channel change script I found here:



Note there are two channel change scripts on this page. I have only tried the perl version. The link to the text version of the perl script is broken, so I just cut and paste the script in the referring page. That worked.

If you look at the script, there is a perl hash with a special rule for each offending channel with a zero. It appears that all the channels in the one hundred range have been accounted for. However, you could easily add a line if anything was missed.

Good Luck!

I tried the perl script but couldnt get it to work. I copied and pasted it into a Windows notepad text file, copied it over to my myth box, ran dos2unix on it, and tried it. It gave me several syntax errors. Any idea what that is all about? I am a newbie to Linux so I am not sure if I missed some permissions or something. Is your script exactly like the one on the Ubutu web page?

_________________
LINHES 8.6.1 BE/FE - MSI K9N6SGM-V with AMD A64 X2 4600+, 4GB Ram. 1.5TB WD. HDHR Prime. Nvidia GT210. MCE remote.
FrontEnd - Dell Vostro 400 3.0GHz Core2Duo NVidia GeForce210. MCE Remote

What were your errors? I often find it is something simple. One initial error may set-off a chain of syntax errors. If you correct the first one, then you correct the others. If you post your errors, I might be able to give you hint.

There is one thing that I forgot to tell you. You have to make sure that the perl interpreter runs. So I did make one edit. I pre-pended an initial line to the perl script:



That tells the shell to execute the script using the perl interpreter. Another way is to just call the interpreter directly with the script as an argument.



You may want to double check the path to the perl interpreter. I am fairly certain it is in /usr/bin/perl but it might be in /usr/local/bin/perl (I am not in front of my machine). An easy way to check is type the command:



I can check my machine this evening if you are still having trouble.

-Mark

The STB works. MythTV doesn't. That means that either mythtv isn't
receiving from the mythtv remote or mythtv isn't sending to the STB.
If you simply attach a keyboard to the mythtv box you can type in
the channel number from it. This means that you are telling mythtv
the number '10' with the keyboard, but mythtv is telling the STB '10'
via irblaster. You have eliminated one of the two things that could be
wrong. If the problem still occurs then the problem is that irblaster
is not sending the '0'. If the problem goes away then the problem
is that LIRC is not receiving the '0'.

No replacing needed, just plug in a keyboard.

Got to go now, sorry, I hope I haven't added confusion.