Flirc on Pi 1. Power issue?

I recently upgraded several of my Pi’s to OSMC. When I did that I converted to flirc from generic MCE receivers that no longer work (covered in another thread, not trying to revive that thread here). My Pi2’s had no problem at all but my Pi1’s seem to be struggling. Sometimes every fifth keystroke is received, sometimes nothing ever happens. Is the Pi1 not powerful enough to power the flirc? I am not plugging anything else into the USB ports. I believe I have eliminated all of the variables. I swapped out power suppliers and cables (all from monoprice), switched remotes from working Pi’s, switched rooms, etc. I did some searching on the net and a flirc rep said that when this behavior happens it is usually a power issue and they recommend not overclocking (my profile is set to “normal”). Any ideas?

Pi 1 B or Pi 1 B+ ?

If it’s a Pi 1 B, especially the very early ones measure the voltage between TP1 and TP2 when the problem is occuring. If it’s less than about 4.7 volts that’s probably your issue.

Early Pi’s had a tendency for the polyfuse to go faulty which causes high voltage drop across it, thus even with an ideal power supply and power lead the voltage across TP1/TP2 will still be too low.

If you have a Pi 1 B+ (4 USB ports like the Pi 2) then you could try the max_usb_current=1 config.txt option.

As always thank you for your reply. They are v1’s. I found the B+ to be flaky when it came to power so I only bought one.

I’ve been debating on upgrading the rest of the fleet to Pi2 - sounds like that is my only option if I want to stick wtih flirc?

Flaky in what way ? I have found the exact opposite - the B+ is the least flaky when it comes to power supply issues and the original model B is by far the worst. The power input circuitry in the B+ was completely redesigned compared to the original B particularly the power to the USB ports which now instead of being directly connected goes via a current limiter which can (with max_usb_current=1) be adjusted to increase output current.

The Pi 2 has more or less identical power circuitry to the B+ and has the same max_usb_current=1 option.

I doubt that the Flirc draws excessive current - I have a Flirc so could test it at some point but I don’t know where my original Pi B is as it long ago fell into disuse. It’s more likely that the voltage is low for some other reason and that the Flirc doesn’t like low voltage - that’s why I suggested measuring it.

I had bad HDMI issues (tearing, etc) using the B+ on just about every tv/power supply in my house. Could have been a bad unit, I’m not sure. For some reason it worked fine in one of my setups - still not sure why. I had it in another thread a while back and tried all kinds of suggestions. Anyway, thanks again for your help!

I can’t even picture what you mean by “tearing” on an HDMI signal - I’ve never even heard of that happening before. To me tearing is something that you might see on an analog signal with a broken earth connection, but not on an HDMI connection.

The main issue that you will get with HDMI if the cable is too long is “speckling” where you see random flickering dots…