Debugging IR remote which stopped working

Help and Support
1

I’m on a RPi2 Model B Rev 1.1 and my previously working IR remote stopped working yesterday & I can’t figure out why that is so I’m hoping for some debugging or troubleshooting tips from the forum :pray:

What happened?

  • I disconnected the current IR receiver & connected another one which I just prepared for a second RPi of mine to test if the new receiver is working, which it did.
  • I re-connected the original one.
  • OSMC did not start anymore for some reason. At least my connected TV did not show any HDMI signal when powering up the Pi.
  • After fiddling around a little (removing & re-inserting the SD card, plug out - plug in, …), OSMC did start again & the signal was on my TV.
  • However, it wasn’t running stable but crashed a few times & showed some warning about insufficient power supply (not sure about the exact wording anymore) which is kind of strange as the Pi had been running stable on the same power supply for quite some time now :man_shrugging:.
  • I connected the Pi to a different power supply and it seems to be running stable again.
  • :fire: My remote with the original receiver which had been working reliably for ~ 2 years now is not working anymore.
  • I have not changed my lircd config, nor any other settings (pin settings etc.).

I really have no idea if all of the above has anything todo with the remote not working anymore but I still wanted to provide the info in case it does :man_shrugging:

FYI, when disconnecting & connecting the GPIO pins, I ensured that the PI was always powered off and even disconnected the power supply completely.

At some point I also updated from OSMC v2022.03 (I think) to the latest v2022.09-1. I think I performed the upgrade after all the above happened but I’m not completely sure anymore. Also I can’t tell whether the remote stopped working before or after the upgrade, so I’m not sure whether it has something to do with it or not…

Current config

  • /etc/lirc/lircd.conf links to /home/osmc/lircd.urc-7955.conf which is a manually created config of mine which I’ve been using for quite some time now
  • Pi config dtoverlay=gpio-ir,gpio_pin=18
  • HW:
    PXL_20220930_082544557
    PXL_20220930_0825445571920×2560 310 KB

More info

  • Running irw /var/run/lirc/lircd-lirc0 doesn’t show any output at all when pressing remote keys
  • I can still control OSMC via my TV remote (I think that’s over HDMI CEC?) but using that in the long term is no real option as this only provides some very basic functionality and lacks a lot of buttons I carefully configured in my lircd config & keymaps over the years.

How to debug/troubleshoot?

I really have no idea, how to troubleshoot this issue and would really appreciate some help & ideas. Please let me know if I can provide any further info, log files etc.

2

This isn’t a setup that I have ever personally played with but I would think that a logical next step would be if you have another sensor available try swapping that in and/or try a different GPIO pin. This is of course assuming that you remembered to double check that the required option to enable this was still present in config-user.txt

3

Some logs would be good – and should let us check your update history. That’s the first thing that I’d be interested in checking.

Cheers

Sam

4

If your IR problem started after upgrading to OSMC 2022-09 then maybe on your pi TWO lircd processes are running in parallel? I had exactly that problem. You can check this by

ps guax| grep lircd

There should be only one running process /usr/sbin/lircd. For a solution of this problem see my thread Unable to get IR to work on bullseye

And check the most trivial, your remote maybe on low battery?

Regards, Michael

5

Thanks for all the suggestions :pray:
I’m a little short on time right now to try them out but will let you know as soon as I find the time to fiddle around further and will provide more logs if still needed!

One question in advance:
What cables do I actually switch when trying different GPIO pins and which pins can I use as new targets? I’m rather unexperienced in electronics…

6

Power and ground stay put. AFAIK you can use whatever GPIO pin you want so just pick one and update your config-user.txt to match.

7

@olwaldi

Doesn’t seem like I have 2 lircd processes running:

image
image1818×131 7.68 KB

Remote batteries should be fine, as the remote is controlling the TV as well without any issues but I’ll double check with new ones.

@sam_nazarko

I created logs with grab-logs -A which can be found here. I’m not really sure if this includes the information you’re looking for. Please let me know if I can provide anything else.

8

This seems to have occurred for you because you manually adjusted the LIRC service.

Have you actually reproduced this on a fresh install off 2022.09-1?

9

@sam_nazarko No, I didn’t try a fresh installation. And you are probably right that my duplicate lircd processes are due to my special way of installation (almost most things done via ssh and restoring my original. kodi folder from buster).

Regards, Michael

10

Took me some time now to actually play around a little and it really was “just” a hardware issue :see_no_evil:

Strange thing is that 2 IRs broke at the same time when I updated both RPIs to the latest OSMC, which is why I didn’t really believe in a HW issue in the first place.

However, 1 had a broken cable and the other one had a broken sensor :man_shrugging:

Thanks for all the helpful comments, I really appreciate it!

1 Like