Re: [Announce] Pierogi - a universal infrared remote control app
 

I'm actually testing the QWERTY thing right now, I was just kinda surprised to find that other keys on the keyboard were changing the tabs as well... :)

Re: [Announce] Pierogi - a universal infrared remote control app
 

Mapping arrows to arrows on remote sounds like all-winner, but of course, making it configurable, is even more neat.

/Estel

Re: [Announce] Pierogi - a universal infrared remote control app
 

Copenicus, do you have any experience building LIRC blasters?

I was looking at building Petteri Aimonens circuit on a standalone GPIO device.

Then using listen/connect on lircd to send commands from Pierogi. This will mean I can send commands over Wifi instead of being limited to 3 meters from my TV and aiming.

Re: [Announce] Pierogi - a universal infrared remote control app
 

Interesting
I am testing this IR repeater at the moment.
My idea was to put it halfway in the room, but unfortunately it's not working for two reasons.
1) In the middle of the room the TV seems to detect both the N900 and the repeater causing confusion, not tried with the IR lead from the schematic.
2) I couldn't get hold of any IR photodiodes that were resistance to white light so it fails with any light (including the light from the TV) :o
Not had time to play since.

Re: [Announce] Pierogi - a universal infrared remote control app
 

I don't know how to overcome the first problem other than to try and create an angle between the three but for the second you can use old, or buy, reversal film and have it developed blank (unexposed). That reversal film will then act as an IR filter. Just selotape it over your photodiode.

Re: [Announce] Pierogi - a universal infrared remote control app
 

Good idea.

I am/was going to try and use a white light filter from some old PIR sensors.
Also extend the TX LED away from the photodiode's.

Hopefully if the repeaters TX LED's are bright enough it will punch through the "noise" from the N900.
Failing that I will have to block the TV's RX from the room so it can only see the repeater.

As I said not had time to play, got other priorities ATM.
Thought the schematic was worth sharing while I remember. :)

Re: [Announce] Pierogi - a universal infrared remote control app
 

Nope; I'm really more of a software guy than a hardware guy. :)

It'd be pretty simple to drive such a device from either LIRC or Pierogi. From what I can see on that diagram, you're really just holding a line high or low to turn the LED on or off. (I should say that neither LIRC nor Pierogi get into the fine details of hardware control; the IR device driver simply asks for an array of timings.)

Of course, there's a lot more hardware required if you want the IR blaster to receive commands over WIFI...

Re: [Announce] Pierogi - a universal infrared remote control app
 

I have the hardware part hopefully, a Raspberry Pi (Sony UK version) with more GPIO options. I was just wondering if it were just a case of using the --listen, --connect option on the appropriate LIRC daemon. I have no idea if those options are what I think they are but from the man page they seem to be what I need to make connecting Pierogi to my Raspberry Pi transparent.

Re: [Announce] Pierogi - a universal infrared remote control app
 

Aha! Well, most likely you've got your Pi running a flavor of Linux. (At least, I haven't heard of any running a non-Linux OS.) Hmm.

Pierogi itself does not use the LIRC server. One of the reasons I created the app was that I don't agree with some of the fundamental design decisions of the LIRC daemon; in particular, it's mainly designed to receive IR data, not send it. (In fact, you don't need a daemon if all you are doing is sending data; there's no point in sitting and waiting to receive commands.) Anyway, Pierogi wants to talk directly to the device driver itself.

The easiest solution would be to create an intermediary, something which listens for commands over the (wifi) network, and translates those into timing values to switch the IR on and off. The LIRC daemon works, as you say, as exactly such an intermediary. Unfortunately, so far as I know, the LIRC daemon can only listen for the commands for a single keyset at a time. And those commands are passed as keywords, not as timing values.

You could also create your own intermediary. That's what I'd do, to set up a daemon that simply listened for timing values and passed them on to the IR device, without worrying about keysets. That'd make things a lot easier for Pierogi, anyway.

In either case, before you can set up either LIRC or Pierogi, you'd need to construct a device driver for your IR hardware. I've not actually done this myself before, but from what I understand it isn't too hard to do...

Re: [Announce] Pierogi - a universal infrared remote control app
 

One more option comes to mind -- the Pi is a ridiculously powerful little device. There's no reason it couldn't run LIRC or Pierogi locally. And, as it can also run its own web server, you could set up something like a browser-based interface to the IR app. Then, just open a browser on the N900 (or, really, any device you want), and point it to the Pi. :)

I haven't yet separated the Pierogi UI from the device and keyset managers (yet another long-term project I'm trying to get to), but it's easy enough to control LIRC right now from a CGI-bin or something. So that's something else you could try...