Long time listener , first time caller.
First off thanks a million to all the folks that make knoppmyth happen:!:

I have been running R5A12 since it's release a year ago and just love it. I decided to dive in and update the box to the latest and greatest R5B7. I will admit that I forgot a lot of the little tweaks and customizations that were done over time on the box. I decided to blow the box away and start from scratch for that nice clean feeling

I have an external DirecTV tuner that has an infrared Irblaster hooked into the com1 on the mythtv box.
When I set this up previously I used the amazing write up at http://losdos.dyndns.org:8080/public/my ... _LIRC.html to set this all up. It really took me by the hand and walked me though what I needed to do to get this up and running.

I have tried to follow these steps again with setting up R5B7 but have met with a lot of failure over the last two days. I would list all the steps that I have tried to make it work from using the latest lirc to modifying the myth_ledxmit.sh script to use com1 but that is not the reason for this post exactly.

During the new install of R5B7 there is a part that inquires if you are using an irblaster! I went through the nice clean setup script and answered that I had the hauppage remote. It also asked what model and I answered with silver. It then asked what com port I was on....then answered 1.

My Hauppage remote works great for navigating around inside MythTV!

The reason for this long winded post is that I am not sure where to define what kind of Satellite tuner I am running like I did with my previous install of MythTV or the change channel script that I would need to use. I am assuming this new part of the MythTV install is geared toward these external digital devices and I think you may be able to define this all now in the same /etc/irblaster/hardware.conf file but I am afraid I am a bit at a loss.

Thank you in advance for pointing me in the right direction!

If you only have one pvr card the script should work great for you.

what you need to do is take the remote.conf file for your sat reciever (get from lirc.org) and rename it to irblasterd.conf; put it in /etc/irblaster.

Then you need to make a channel change script. However you did it before should work but instead of lircd1 use irblasterd.


This is mine (sorta)

#!/bin/sh
STB_NAME=DCT2000
for digit in $(echo $1 | sed -e 's/./& /g'); do
irsend --device=/dev/irblasterd SEND_ONCE $STB_NAME $digit
sleep 0.7
done
irsend --device=/dev/irblasterd SEND_ONCE $STB_NAME OK

Name it whatever you like (change_channel.sh)

I put it in /etc/irblaster. Then just reference it from the setup screens.

*NOTE I have not actually got it working yet due to having 2 pvr cards so I had to go back to the way I have done it in the past. Should this not work for you search for a post by me that describes how I have mine working.

iscraigh - Could you do the dance of IR blaster clue bestowal for wanttoknow over here? http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=9093
Thx!

Thank you for the very prompt reply!

I went strait to work to see if I could make this happen. I am afraid I did not have a lot of success but you have me in the right direction now

Here are my configs from the /etc/irblaster

hardware.conf



irblasterd.conf


change_chan.sh


When I try and run the change_chan.sh script by hand this is what I get.


Also when I put those conf files in the /etc/irblaster directory my Hauppage remote stop working to navigate around the MythTV menu screens. When I pull the files out of the /etc/irblaster directory the Hauppage remote starts working again to navigate the screens.

I do see both of these processes running when they are both enabled.
3343 root 21:22 /usr/sbin/irblasterd --driver=default --device=/dev/lirc1 --pidfile=/var/run/irb ...
3503 root 21:22 /usr/sbin/lircd --driver=default –device=/dev/lirc



Thanks again for the help!

This could be an order of startup issue. I'm not sure how lirc_serial knows to use /dev/lirc1 and lirc_gpio (or whatever else it is that handles your remote) knows to use /dev/lirc.

Perhaps someone could do some manual fiddling adding and removing the modules and running lircd/irblasterd to see if it is an order of modules loading thing.

I have been working on this and learning a lot (more than I ever wanted to know) about lirc.

When I do an "irblaster stop" in the /etc/init.d dir it complains that it cannot unload lirc_serial because it's in use.

Does irblaster need to use it's own version of lirc_serial or can it share the one that it is using with whatever else has it open?

The other thing I see is that when I get a list of open files the lircd has /dev/lirc open but irblaster does not have /dev/lirc1 open. Also it looks like irblaster is firing up first since it has a lower PID so if we have a timing issue on load order how can I get irblaster to fire up second?

Well I found out how to change the load order.

I went into /etc/rc5.d and renamed the symbolic link s20irblaster to s40irblaster.

lircd got a pid of 2862 and irblaster got a pid of 4160.

This had no effect on things. I assume this is what was meant by timing.

I suspect this module load order issue is what is giving isgraigh problems too. I am hopingto work through it with him this weekend. Basically, the lirc modules are loaded when /etc/init.d/lirc runs and the irblaster module (lirc_serial) is loaded when /etc/init.d/irblaster runs. Looking in /etc/rc5.d, they both have the startup number 20 which means they will just start in alphabetical order meaning that S20irblaster runs before S20lirc. To fix this you will need to do some update-rc.d commands to change the startup number for irblaster to something greater than 20. Not sure exactly what commands. check the man page.

We found the problem with iscraig's irblaster setup ( http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic. ... 4331#54331 ), but it seems you have already tried something similar. What is the exact symptom of your problem now?

Sorry it took a few days to get back to this.
I tried all the setup that you have written up in this post
http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=9352

It gets me a bit further along. Now when the irblaster.conf is populated my Hauppage remote still works unlike before but I still can't get it to change channels on my sattelite dish.
I deleted the old /dev/irblaster and /etc/mythtv/modules/lirc_serial. It re-created those and the /dev/irblasterd.
I modified my change_chan.sh to this.


When I run that I get no errors like before but at the same time nothing happens either.

I do see this in the /var/log/syslog though and am not sure if this is the problem or just cosmetic.


Thanks for all of your hard work on the irblaster stuff Greg Frost!

hmmm. That smp bug log message occurs for me too (at startup and on each irsend), but my blaster works so I havent worried about it. I have heard that others have recompiled the kernel without SMP support to get rid of it.
Please post the result ofWhile you are at it, What happens when you run at the command line:

ls -la /dev/lirc* /dev/irblaster*



ls -laR /sys/class/lirc


root@mythtv:~# cat /sys/class/lirc/lirc*/dev


ps ax | grep ir




I am afraid nothing happens at all but at least it does not throw an error

That all looks to be configured the way it should be.

Do you have a com2 port? Might be worth trying it.

To discount the possibility that the lirc_serial module settings are not working, look at
/sys/module/lirc_serial/parameters/io (should be 1016 which is 0x3f8) and /sys/module/lirc_serial/parameters/irq (should be 4).

Perhaps check in your bios to check if there is something strange (ports disabled, irq or io ports that do not use the traditional irq4 io3f8 for com1 and irq3 io2f8 for com2).

For checking hardware, check to see if the blaster is lighting up using a digital camera (they can detect infra red), perhaps your config file is not correct.

Could your IR led have blown? Did you make the blaster yourself?

One of the things I did to check that the serial port was working correctly when I first set my blaster up was to use a multimeter to measure the voltage on the pin that controls the blaster (I think it was pin 4, but you could check the blaster documentation). Then I did an irsend with SEND_START (or something like that, again check the man page) instead of SEND_ONCE and I saw the voltage the multimeter was registering changed. This made me confident that I had the right COM port and the software was controlling it.

[quote="Greg Frost"]hmmm. That smp bug log message occurs for me too (at startup and on each irsend), but my blaster works so I havent worried about it. I have heard that others have recompiled the kernel without SMP support to get rid of it.]

This has troubled me for some time. I have gone through the pain of recompiling the kernel with SMP disabled using my previous hardware (EPIA M12000) and sure enough, that gets rid of this bug. Now I am using the Dragon hardware (with an AMD64) I wonder if disabling the SMP support will have a detremental effect on performance?

Algenon.

_________________
Dragon without HDTV card, PVR350, PAL-UK