While reading an article the other day I had an idea formulate in my head. I have a older USB CommandIR Mini that has 4 emitters and 1 receiver. This would make a great use of the Raspberry Pi, a network based IR gateway. Originally it was only for Linux, but now it is supported in WinLIRC which I haven’t tired.
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| Newer version of mine |
First thing was to do some research and see about getting it to work on the Raspberry Pi with an ARM CPU. So here is a run down of how I got it to work.
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| Rear ports |
- Get LIRC installed: The version that is available in the Debian Squeeze repository isn’t new enough to support the CommandIR. In this case you need to download the lastest version from here: http://www.lirc.org/.
- Extract somewhere like your home directory.
- tar -xvf lir-0.9.0.tar
- Before you try and compile it, you need libUSB:
- sudo apt-get install libusb-dev
- Go into the extracted folder and start setup.sh:
- sudo ./setup.sh
- Might need sudo apt-get install dialog if you get Dialog not found!
- Now you need to select a few options:
- #1, #8, #8(might be#9), #3
- Here are screenshots of the install process, scroll down to “LIRC Upgrade from Source”
- Once it completes run the following to complete the install
- sudo make
- sudo make install
- Plug in the CommandIR and try this to make sure the it starts.
- sudo lircd –driver=commandir
- Last part is to get the conf files which will go in to
- /etc/lirc
- Here is the link to the hardware.conf and how to create the lircd.conf
- Base lircd.conf http://www.commandir.com/component/option,com_jdownloads/Itemid,53/task,view.download/cid,3/
- Setup remotes and devices http://lircconfig.commandir.com/
- Hardware.conf: http://www.commandir.com/component/option,com_jdownloads/Itemid,53/task,view.download/cid,15/
- I ended up reboot everytime I made changes to the config file since the init.d script isn’t working
- sudo reboot
- Here you can try these commands and make sure the IR emitter light blinks
The only problems I have is I still can’t figure out is when I reboot I can’t get it to auto start LIRCD. I have to run lird at the prompt which then everything works. Now I am trying to configure my devices I would like to control like the Xbox and TV. So far I can’t get the Xbox to respond. I haven’t tried the TV yet or the receiver. Not sure yet what I will do with this functionality. First will probably be to make it web controlled and then make it part of my home automation. May some voice control?
If you need more help you can check their website http://www.commandir.com/content/view/83/96/ or email their support.
Let me know if you get it working and what you end up doing with it.
Images are from commandir.com