I took the plunge and upgraded my TV box to Ubuntu 12.04 from 10.04. I opted to do a complete re-install rather than upgrade. I do realise 12.10 is now out, but this post has been sat around needing a tidy up for a while 😉
Getting the remote working last time wasn’t entirely straightforward and hasn’t really improved. I didn’t take any notes last time around either, so I’ve kept notes this time and hope they are of use to someone else. I think half the problem is due to being a cheapskate and getting a generic mce remote rather than the official one!
The Remote
I’m using this one from Maplin.
The USB IR receiver that came with the remote is reported as being a Formosa21 eHome Infrared Transceiver with Device ID 147a:e03e:
Bus 005 Device 002: ID 147a:e03e Formosa Industrial Computing, Inc. Infrared Receiver [IR605A/Q]
Initial Results
With the 12.04 kernel and standard version of lirc the remote is successfully identified and when running irw it spits out button codes for most of the buttons on the remote. Some of the buttons are not recognised, but more disappointingly out of the box XBMC doesn’t respond to the remote at all.
So there are two problems that we need to deal with here:
- Updating the lirc config file for the additional buttons
- Getting XBMX to recognise the remote