Vero 4K + IR Queries

Hey

I was wondering if anyone could point me in the right direction or answer some general questions about the Vero with respect to infra red?
I’ve started using the IR receiver and it works really well and I was thinking about being able to send IR commands. Would a mono 3.5mm IR transmitter, plugged into the 2nd headphone jack, be able to work alongside the Vero 4k IR receiver, plugged into the 1st headphone jack?

i.e are they standard headphone jacks and signals are interpreted by the hardware/driver and its just a matter of setting it up correctly?
Or is the Vero 4k IR headphone jack special?

Ive seen stuff about sending IR signals from a Pi using the gpio but this strategy obviously wont work for the Vero 4k.

So any pointers, tips on applicable hardware, would be greatly appreciated.

The Vero 4K has a built in IR blaster. However, it’s not possible to use the 3.5mm socket to blast these signals, so the Vero 4K would need line of sight with the front of it (by the LED) and the device you are planning to control

Sam

Oh really, that could work actually.

Can you give me any advice on how to actually send signals from it?
Because I successfully recorded a remote using the IR receiver and I was then trying to figure out if the IR extender had a transmitter in it and using the following commands:

irsend SEND_ONCE /home/osmc/N2QAYB001010.conf KEY_1
irsend -d SEND_ONCE /home/osmc/N2QAYB001010.conf KEY_1

(relating to the config file I was recording)

And I keep on getting:

irsend: timeout
irsend: could not connect to socket
irsend: No such file or directory

I figured that it didnt have a transmitter so didnt try much harder. But now that you have indicated it has one built in ive tried:

sudo irsend -d /var/run/lirc/lircd-lirc0 SEND_ONCE /home/osmc/N2QAYB001010.conf KEY_1

Which comes back

irsend: command failed: SEND_ONCE /home/osmc/N2QAYB001010.conf KEY_1
irsend: hardware does not support sending

All the Irsend stuff I can find on the forum seems to relate to the pi and the gpio method so im not sure how to apply the information to the vero.

Unforunately there’s no trivial way to blast signals using a user space tool like irsend. There hasn’t been much of a demand for it in the past so we didn’t do any development for it.

For now you need to ioctl on ioblaster device, and the kernel would have to be built with CONFIG_AM_IRBLASTER.

Maybe in the future it can be adapted to work with ir-send by building a kernel module which exposes the necessary functionality for LIRC, and setting it as a transmitter module in lircd.conf.

Your comment seems to suggest that the built in IR blaster does work, just not with IR send? If it is currently working (on the build as is) then how does it work?
Or do you just mean it technically does have the functionality but its never been implemented?

I may be willing to rebuild the kernel to make it work, but its not something im too confident about. Have you got a beginners guide you could point me at? And probably the reinstall instructions for the vero for when it inevitably goes wrong.

The hardware is there, but there is no software to utilise it yet.

At this point I would recommend waiting. We may be able to add ir-send support in the future

Sam

Yeah I think I’m likely to take your advice and will wait.

If/when it works I may set it up so that I can add some remote signals for my sound bar.
But until then I have a work around using background music to prevent it switching off.

Full support for the IR blaster in LIRC would be great for controlling additional devices with Vero :slight_smile:

Hello,

Any News on this?
I am in the same situation, i need to control my audio receiver with ir signals.
For now i am running an RPI with osmc and an IR LED connectet to the GPIO.
I build some scripts to control it with irsend.
But I want to switch to a VERO 4k+

There hasn’t been any further development of this due to a lack of demand

Sam

I would be pretty much interested in this too. I could utilize it to control my projector screen.

Edit: do I understand correctly that even an external IR Blaster (like ms mce) cannot be used?
…or is this “limitation” only valid for the in-built blaster in Vero 4k?

Hello @sam_nazarko, sorry to revive an old thread but I’ve recently got interested in doing this too. Since it’s still not possible to do this via a userspace tool like irsend, is there a “hard” way to do it? I mean, maybe, controlling the hardware directly?

Thank you.

It could be done with some ioctls, but it isn’t trivial. In some testing we also found the performance to be bad, because the case isn’t designed with the idea of sending signals.