I have two RPi B+ with OSMC latest update and GPIO IR receivers and Harmony 650 remotes. I’ve started experiencing the repeat madness, where the remote will work fine for a number of commands, but then suddenly repeat continuously and be unresponsive until it stops repeating.
I’ve tried multiple profiles, a fresh install, different IR receivers, different power supplies. A USB keyboard works fine.
Just at the moment I’m using the Xbox 360 profile, which from reading prior posts on this I thought had been customized to eliminate one of the possible causes of this. Suggestions for other ways to troubleshoot?
The Xbox 360 profile works spot on - I wrote and tested it myself with my own Xbox 360 remote and a good GPIO receiver. No repeats at all.
There are two likely causes for your problem:
Ambient light on the sensor. Either direct daylight is shining on the Pi, or certain types of compact fluorescent bulbs running in the room (even if not directly shining on the Pi) can cause flicker not visible to the eye that produces spurious output from a GPIO receiver. I actually see this issue with a particular light in my living room that I don’t normally use - turn the light off, the remote works perfectly.
You have the wrong model of TSOP or you are trying to power it from 5v instead of 3.3v. There are literally dozens of models of TSOP’s all with somewhat different parameters. Some work better than others. Some are more prone to interference from other light sources than others. Some do not work reliably at 3.3v, and so on. The model I use is the TSOP38238, I can’t speak for other models.
Thanks, very helpful. I hadn’t considered environmental factors. I’ve moved the Pi around and in some cases can produce continuous repeats (without the remote in the room). At the moment, I’m not seeing repeats.
The IR’s are the Radio Shack 4838 on the 3.3v pin, so I think that isn’t it. It could be sunlight or maybe something else. No flourescent.
I also used to find my Flirc receiver that I use on my Mac hyper-sensitive and sometimes disturbed by ambient lighting. In that case instead of lying it pointing towards the user on a USB extension cable I simply plugged it directly into the USB port on the back of the Mac pointing away from the user - it picks up plenty of IR signal from the reflection on the wall behind it and that reduced the direct ambient light falling on it - problem solved.
A similar approach might work here - turn the IR sensor around to deliberately fact into the back of your IR cabinet - if it still picks up your remote OK that might be all it takes to reduce the ambient light levels at the sensor.
Turning it around seems to work. (I recall some years ago putting sunglasses on my Roku). This also is a plasma TV, and they were working ok in the area of an LCD, so that also might be in play. Thanks for reminding me of that popcornmix.
Slightly off topic, but with the 360 remote, what do you use for Guide? XboxGuide is commented out and Guide is not defined.
I left the XBox Guide button commented out basically because I couldn’t think of a meaningful function to assign to it! Every function I could think of is already assigned in the profile. I left it in but commented to make it easy for people to assign a custom function to the Xbox Guide button.
If you are able to test on OpenElec please do. I had remote repeats on a recent OSMC install but do not have them on OpenElec using the same hardware. It may be a software issue rather then a hardware one.
