Wife asked if I could get a low battery indication to pop-up like our Dish Network box. "Uh... I don't know..." I'm thinking Caller ID would be huge as well, but she seems interested in the battery. Anyone have low bat or CID working?

Low battery? What battery does she want to know the status of? I'm confused....

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Mike
My Hardware Profile

Hi,

I had the same question, what battery?. My KM boxes run on AC via a simple stupid ups.

it is easy to put a message on the screen, the trick is to get the desired information to be displayed.

My

I'm guessing she uses a laptop as a front end? There's a utility that will let you send text to the screen called osd_cat. See /usr/local/bin/ver.sh for an example of how to use it. Then all you need is a way to tell if the battery is low, probably something like mbmon or lmsensors, and a script to poll it every 30 seconds or so and pop up an OSD alert...

Oh no... so sorry. Actually the remote control battery! On the old Dish DVR it would pop-up and tell us when the battery was low and needed to be changed. I don't even know how it could tell? A low signal? But it actually worked on the RF and IR remotes! (Kinda cool in a geeky way)

When you click the remote, and nothing happens, the battery is low, really low. It's been in there a while.

Seriously, save yourself the trouble and have her get you a Harmony 880 for Christmas! It's got a battery indicator on the screen. Just one more reason to love the 880. It's got a clock too! And it's got a very high WAF.

If I had to guess, It "detected" a low battery by popping up the message at a fixed interval, say 4 months. My fridge does this with its "Time to change the water filter light." It does this even though I use the bypass plug instead of a filter.
you could easily implement this in cron, and osd_cat.

It has me wondering how you REALLY detect a weakening battery versus the remote being too far away. I'm thinking the shape of each pulse might just change if the battery was running low, and the overall height of each pulse would decrease across a string of pulses. What I can't figure out is how to detect this without doing some DSP work that would be horribly overblown when compared to putting a low battery indicator on the remote.

With a STB and remote that are designed to work together, the remote could send a battery condition code. Probably before/after a certain event, such as power on/off.
I bet that's how they're doing it. Pretty clever, but propietary.