External IR blaster not working

Help and Support Vero 4K / Vero 4K +
1

I’ve read that the Vero 4k has an internal IR blaster, but not (yet?) the driver support for sending IR codes. Luckily I have an external Microsoft IR blaster (with a Philips chipset), which I used succesfully on my RP2 with OpenElec. However, I’m having issues getting it to work on the Vero 4k.
On booting the led (the normal one, not the ir led) flashes a few times as it also did on the RP2. After booting the led stays on. On the RP2 it stayed off and only flased when blasting. The device is recognized properly and appears in /dev/lirc1 and /var/run/lirc/lircd-lirc1. However, when I try to blast, nothing happens. No error and the IR led doesn’t light up.

irsend -d /var/run/lirc/lircd-lirc1 SEND_ONCE myremote KEY_VOLUMEDOWN

I also tried disabling the onboard blaster by blacklisting the ‘meson-ir’ driver in modprobe, but this didn’t make any difference.

Any idea on how to solve this?

2

Hi

There’s been a bit of discussion about the IR blaster.
It’s there, but we do not yet have a userspace interface for this for irsend to consume.

It’s something I would like to add in the future, but a couple of questions to guide things:

  • Do you need to use ir-send, or would being able to use /dev/irblaster be OK?
  • Do you know the carrier frequency and codes of the signals you’d want to send?

Cheers

Sam

3

Does an external blaster need the same userspace interface or does it already have one?
I finally would like to use LIRC.Send() from Kodi, but any other solution I can call from Kodi is fine. However, I’m unaware of /dev/irblaster

I’m blasting to a Yamaha receiver. This is my lircd.conf:

begin remote
  name	myremote
  bits           16
  flags SPACE_ENC|CONST_LENGTH|REVERSE
  eps            30
  aeps          100
  header       8853  4532
  one           533  1714
  zero          533   589
  ptrail        533
  pre_data_bits   16
  pre_data       0x857A
  gap          107903
  toggle_bit      0
  begin codes
      KEY_VOLUMEUP             0x000000000000E51A
      KEY_VOLUMEDOWN           0x000000000000E41B
  end codes
end remote
4

Okay, that refines my expectations of what users would like.
I’ll ticket this and log your post so this isn’t forgotten, but it may be a bit of time until I can revisit.

Cheers

Sam

5

Thanks, I’m looking forward to it :wink:

Robin