HDHR IR Receiver + WinLIRC + Virtual Serial Port

[agheno]

I'm not really sure what question to ask so I'll start with: How does LIRC interpret the IR data from HDHR?

I read in the MythTV intructions that the IR reciever can be used under linux with the LIRC application. A port of LIRC exists for windows but it lacks the ability to receive IR signals from a UDP source like the original LIRC application. My workaround for this is to use a program called HW VSP3 to configure a bridge between a TCP connection and a virtual serial port which WinLIRC can read from. I am also using two netcat sessions to tunnel between HDHR's UDP output stream and HW VSP3's TCP input stream. WinLIRC attaches to the virtual device on COM3.

The data flow is basically works like this:
HDHR (output to UDP 5000) -> [ netcat (listen on UDP 5000) -> netcat (output to TCP 5000) ] -> HW VSP3 (listen on TCP 5000, output to COM3) -> WinLIRC (listening to COM3)

I have verified with hyperterminal connected to COM3 that data is flowing from the HDHR to my virtual serial port (com3) when I press a button on any of my remotes. Under WinLIRC I had to set the receiver type to RX instead of DCD -- I'm not really sure what the difference is but with DCD selected I do not get any information from the 'Raw Codes' window. Chaning the Baud rate and Virtual pulse doesn't seem to make a difference but for now I have them set to 9600 baud and 300 pulse. With the 'Raw Codes' window open, I press a button on my remote for a few seconds and get output similar to this:

[jhaglund]

I am attempting to get this working with EventGhost (eventghost.org). How, and what commands are you issuing to netcat?

[cncb]

Ugh. It's almost like the infrared receiver is not meant to work with Windows. I took a slightly different approach (wrote a program that sends the UDP data directly to a virtual COM port) but I'm running into the exact same problem. I don't suppose you ever were able to figure this out (or ever visited the forums again)?

[agheno]

cncb: I ended up getting side tracked on other projects so I didn't make any real progress with the HDHR IR receiver under windows. Some time after that, a friend of mine gave me a WMC IR receiver that he received at a tradeshow so I just used that instead.

I have to say that the core functionality of tuning ASTC channels is what I purchased the HDHR for and it works perfectly. Although the IR interface would have been a nice bonus, I still would have purchased the HDHR even without it. With that said, I really wonder why SiliconDust would go through the effort to engineer the hardware to include the IR input but not write the actual drivers to take advantage of it on the most common platforms. It seems like with all the parts in place to make it happen, it was arbitrarily left incomplete.

I hope my comment does not get taken as a negative complaint against the SiliconDust developers -- they delivered on what is important and that's all that really matters to me.

[jimparis]

Forwarding the UDP data to a virtual com port won't work -- when WinLIRC uses a serial port, it's not using it to transfer byte-oriented data, but watching the DCD or RX line to determine timing information "manually". You would need to modify the WinLIRC code with something similar to the hw_udp driver in LIRC. It wouldn't be very hard -- basically modify irdriver.cpp to support listening on a UDP port, and every time a packet is received, call SetData and SetEvent with the received data as appropriate.

[jimparis]

Alternately, it would probably not be difficult to compile and run LIRC in Windows with either cygwin or msys. The hw_udp driver is basically just POSIX so it should work fine. Your apps could then connect to the LIRC server instead of the WinLIRC server to receive button presses.

[cncb]

[cncb]

[jimparis]

Yeah, I'm me. As I said in my second post I don't think changing WinLIRC is worth the trouble (I'm also not equipped for it anymore). Just build LIRC with hw_udp in cygwin. I've tested it here and it seems to basically work -- this is rough and only barely tested but it should be enough to get the idea across:

• install cygwin. use the default list of packages and add 'wget', 'gcc4' and 'make'
  
• load cygwin and get the lirc source
  

  Code:

  wget http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/lirc/lirc-0.8.6.tar.bz2

  
  
• unpack and build lirc
  

  Code:

  tar xvf lirc-0.8.6.tar.bz2 cd lirc-0.8.6 ./configure --with-driver=udp --disable-daemonize make

  (ignore the errors when building lircmd.exe; the required irrecord and lircd executables should have already been built successfully)
  
• record your remote
  

  Code:

  cd daemons ./irrecord.exe ~/myremote.conf

  
  
• then run lircd with that new config
  

  Code:

  ./lircd.exe --pidfile=/tmp/pid --output=/tmp/socket --listen ~/myremote.conf

  
  
• now it should be listening on TCP port 8765 just like WinLIRC would.
  

[cncb]

Thank you very much, Jim! I never would have figured this out on my own. I have only done limited testing but it seems to be working great. The only slight deviation from Jim's instructions are that you need to add the "-H udp -d 5000" options to the irrecord.exe and lircd.exe commands (where 5000 is the port number as described in the HDHR Myth setup instructions).

This is probably obvious to Linux users but is there a way to run the "lircd.exe" command when starting up cygwin so that just a shortcut to cygwin in Windows will get everything running properly? Thanks.

[jimparis]

You can set up a normal Windows shortcut with a location of:

[NeoMatrixJR]

What should this work with? Can I use it to pipe commands to Win7 MCE? How can I test to see if it's receiving anything? I can't seem to find the irw command.