[mythtv-users] Remote

[Jeff Wormsley]

Glen Johnson wrote:
> Anyone know if this remote and more importantly the USB transceiver will
> work with linux, preferably fedora 4 or 5.
> Google didn't turn up anything.
> http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=LIBRA-Q11&cpc=SCH&srm=0
> Looks like a pretty good deal.
> Opinions?

I bought one, as well as the other small USB remote ( 
http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=FC-778 ) they had on sale last 
week.  I got them yesterday, and played around with them a bit last night.

On Windows, the Libra works like you'd expect an MCE remote to work on 
standard Windows.  The arrows move the mouse, the volume keys change the 
volume, Ok and Enter act as the return button, the numbers will enter 
numbers just like from the keyboard.  The remote itself, however, is 
pretty much junk.  Very flimsy, and horrible tactile feedback.  The 
cluster at the top for Play, FFW, RW, etc is way too small for my 
fingers, and it is almost impossible not to press two buttons at once.

The FC-778 is absolute junk.  I mean junk.  I've gotten better plastic 
items in a box of Cracker Jacks.  In Windows, to use it, you have to run 
an application (it can be autostarted, but...).  Apparently, it has a 
user mode HID interface, and not much in the way of a real device driver.

However, I didn't buy either for the remote, only the USB IR receiver, 
in hopes of replacing my serial IRMAN.  So, after playing in Windows a 
while, I decided to fire up my old Myth drive (since replaced with a 
laptop drive) in a spare box to see how they functioned in Linux.  This 
is an FC4 box, with I believe a '15 series kernel, and LIRC 0.8 
installed.  I had to install usbutils as well to get any decent 
information, but even with that, I'm not sure what it all means.  But 
here's what I remember (I'm at work now, so I can't repeat any of my 
experiments to be sure).

The Libra shows up when you use lsusb with a vendor and device ID that I 
can't find any reference to, anywhere on the net.  The FC unit's vendor 
ID matches that of a smart card reader by the same company.  Both are 
seen by hotplug as shown by looking at dmesg, but the system doesn't 
know what to do with them.  Neither work with LIRC as installed from atrpms.

So I downloaded the source tarball, unpacked it, and ran ./setup to see 
if either would work out of the box with mceusb or mceusb2, or any of 
the other USB IR receiver drivers (there are a surprising number 
available in 0.8).  After several make, make install cycles, I had no 
luck there, either, although I am not 100% sure I had the right 
parameters in my modprobe.conf for each test.

Hopefully, I will be able to poke around in the source some tonight or 
this weekend and see if just putting the vendor/device ID's in the right 
place in the code will allow the Libra to work as an MCE USB receiver.

I doubt the FC will work as an MCE receiver.  I took it apart to see 
what made it tick.  The board is surprisingly sparse.  It uses an 
ST72F63BK1M1 processor, which is a flash chip with USB, a tiny bit of 
RAM, ADC and timer, which looks to be about as bare minimum a set of 
features as possible for a remote receiver.  I have no idea how to 
decode what protocols it is using.  I haven't taken the Libra receiver 
apart yet.

If anyone knows what tools can be used to sniff out the (USB side) 
protocols, I'd appreciate it.  Perhaps one of these is close enough to 
an existing unit I can hack the driver to work with it.  I'm not up to 
coding a linux driver from scratch, though.

Jeff.