remote controlled PCs using IR

Post by **^rooker** » Sat Jan 31, 2004 12:22 am

board layouts (and other soldering stuff) can be found at:
http://werkstatt.defconstudios.com/forum/werkstatt/viewtopic.php?t=121

Post by **^rooker** » Sat Jan 31, 2004 12:37 am

Currently, I am rather unhappy with the quality of the transmitter, since it is very intolerant regarding the positioning.

I am suspecting the rather "large" distance between sender and receiver (e.g. TV, DVD-player, ...) which is currently about 4m.

Post by **^rooker** » Sat Jan 31, 2004 12:50 am

I'm not really sure, if this is supposed to be normal, but immediately after attaching the transmitter to the serial port, the LED is off.
After a few seconds it "fades in" and stays glowing.
Whenever an IR signal is sent, it pulse-flashes (I assume that THIS is normal)

Post by **^rooker** » Sat Jan 31, 2004 2:40 am

Since I am not satisfied with the hit ratio of my transmitter, I am currently experimenting different improvement possibilities.

After analyzing signals coming from a standard remote (using 'irw'), I've discovered, that when pushing the button normally, at least 2 pulses are sent.
In combination with witnessing that using 'rc' with "SEND_START" + "SEND_STOP" + the 'sleep' command has higher hit ratio, I've tried a little script, which REALLY improved the hits (compared to "SEND_ONCE"):

---------------------
remote="my_remote";
pause="250000"; #time in microseconds. 500000 is 1/2 second.
key=$2;

rc SEND_START $remote $key; usleep $pause
rc SEND_STOP $remote $key;
---------------------

Post by **^rooker** » Sat Mar 06, 2004 1:51 pm

"thou shalt not reinvent the wheel..."

Just yesterday I've accidentially discovered, that it's possible to add
"min_repeat x" to the remote-control config file (e.g. lircd.conf) which does exactly the same thing - just better.

I've experimented a bit and found out that a value of 2 or 3 works fine.

Das Werkstatt