far, far away

Set up LIRC generally

The first thing to do, is to set up lirc itself. In older days, you had to recompile your kernel or at least compile certain modules. That was an ugly process. Today there are some remotes available for which the installation is really easy. Ours is one of them. Simply install lirc with this command-line:

sudo aptitude install lirc 

and you'll get ask, which dongle you have. Select there Asus Digital Home, press enter and well, that it at first. This installation is putting a lircd.conf and some other files into the directory /dev/lirc. There is also one called 'hardware.conf'. That one is very important. But first, let's test the remote control. To do this, there is a simple programm in the lirc-package. It is called 'irw' and you may start it from the commandline/a shell. At first nothing happens, but If you press a button on the remote-control (expecting that the dongle is plugged in before [!!] starting irw and that you are pointing to this dongle), there should appear some lines, ending with 'AsusDH'.

If that is the case, everything is alright and you can go on with installing pylirc. Don't worry if it didn't for you, because it didn't for me either. That's bad, but there is a good reason. Okay, well, it is not _good_ but it better than having the problem without any reason . The reason is, that HAL is detecting the device as a HID-Device and is loading the hiddev-driver (you can see that, if you use the hal-device-manager). For some would the solution be to prevent hiddev from beeing loaded system wide, but for me that is not a solution, because currently I've also a Keyboard plugged in, which is using the hiddev. In fact, HAL should not detect the asusdh as a hid-device but as an lirc-thing, but it does not yet, so let's change the lirc configuration to use the hiddev device the lirc device instead. That is very easy, just open the /etc/lirc/hardware.conf in your favorite editor and set the variable 'DEVICE' to your hiddev device. Normally this should be /dev/usb/hiddev0, for me it was /dev/usb/hiddev1 because my keyboard is loaded first. Don't forget that you've set this variable, because If you remove the keyboard, stick in another one HID-Device (like a keyboard) or you change the position of your USB-Dongle, the order may change and you'll wonder, why your remote control is not working anymore.

Now restart lirc and test again with irw:

sudo /etc/init.d/lircd restart

irw

If there is still nothing happening, you have not selected the correct device file. If it reacts, then go on with installing pylirc.

Installing pylirc

is really easy. You just go here and download the latest tarball (the tar.gz-file). Don't use the debian packages, they are too old for gutsy and you'll always get annoying messages. Unpack it, and go into the directory. You need a working build-essential enviroment (but I think I've already one for pigment ). You also need the lirc-dev packages, which you can install by doing

sudo aptitude install liblircclient-dev

You also need the python-setuptools (and you should already have installed them for elisa!). Then you can do:

sudo python setup.py install

If there are no errors, then let's check the installation by doing starting the python shell (just type python in a shell) and in there you type (and press enter)

import pylirc 

If nothing seems to happen, everything is alright and you can leave the shell with quit(). Otherwise the installation of pylirc didn't work and you should retry it.

Now elisa is generally able to handle lirc-events. Thats cool. 

Set up lirc for elisa 

Now we replace the file /etc/lirc/lircd.conf with this (you have to be root to do that!):

# 
# brand:         Asus
# model:         Asus DH Deluxe IR
#

begin remote

  name        AsusDH
  bits        32
  pre_data_bits    32
  pre_data    0xFF000000
  post_data_bits  0

    begin codes
      POWER            0x01
      QUICK_POWER        0x02
      NOISE_OFF        0x03
      WIFI            0x04
      MENU        0x05
      RED        0x06
      UP            0x07
      LEFT            0x08
      OK        0x09
      RIGHT     0x0A
      DOWN        0x0B
    end codes

end remote 

Thats makes it easier for us, to use the file in elisa. We now don't have to change anything in the elisa.conf-file. I hope that this step is obsolete very soon because of new signal-naming, but actually it is necessary. Okay. restart lirc and try again with irw. It is working there, you can start your elisa (be sure that you didn't remove the lirc-stuff from the lirc-configuration file yet!) and use it with the asus DH: most keys have the place you would expect, but there are some you should know about:

• power-key: quits elisa (only)
• ap-launch:  toggle the menu
• fullscreen: well, what would you expect?

The other three keys are not yet used, because elisa does actually not know any more keys (and has no actions for them). Keep on playing!

The elisa lirc configuration section

Well, in most cases you should not need to set there anything for this remote control, but if I'm already speacking about lirc, I can not skip this .

Currently (0.3.1) there are these values in the section

[base:lirc_input]
# filename of the LIRC config map to use
lirc_rc = 'streamzap.lirc'
delay = '4'
repeat = '1'

The first option is the lirc_rc file, which elisa should load to know, which key of the remote control should point to which elisa internal key. This is hopefully obsolete very soon, with the signal-naming project of the UMC! Then you'll not have more than one set of keys for all remotes and we can 'hardcode' them.

The second and the third one are simply the things to overwrite in the configuration-file of lirc. That means, if you change the lirc-file in the first option, you should not forget to set the dealy and repeat option in there. You should only touch this files, if you know what you are doing!

But changing this parameters (for the default configuration) is very usefull. They are just overwriting  the values of lirc-configuration and so I'll only quote, what they say about it:

• repeat: tells the program what shall happen if a key is repeated. A value of zero tells the program to ignore repeated keys. Any other positive value 'n' tells the program to pass the config string every 'n'-th time to the according application, when a key is repeated. The default for repeat is zero.
• delay: tells the program to ignore the specified number of key repeats before using the "repeat" configuration directive above. This is used to prevent double triggers of events when using a fast repeat rate. A value of zero, which also is the default, will disable the delay function.

Both are really usefull! If you change the values your remote comes more or less sensitiv. The default values are already very usefull, but for certain remotes, you may want to change it (like for the apple-remote...).Have a lot of fun. And as always: do not hesitate to comment this article!