Re: Now 8.99 Delivered for MCE Remote!

[Kim Wall <kim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Mark McCall wrote:
> http://www.automatedhome.co.uk/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=1480

> Bargain!

I'll second that.  Mine arrived yesterday.  Using it as a remote for an
Ubuntu-based MythTV frontend.

It appears as a pair of HID devices, one of which sends standard
keycodes (eg. the navigation arrows, number keys and a few others should
function on anything that supports the HID standard).  The rest of the
keys (VCR controls, volume, etc) are a bit more proprietry.

Physically, it's a bit cheap and plasticy, but less so than the
Hauppauge remotes, for example.  Can't say I'm thrilled with the
ergonomics, but the buttons are reasonably solid and responsive, and the
range seems decent enough.  The receiver module has a red blinkenlight
to show you that it's working, which is handy.  Well worth it for less
than a tenner.

For the benefit of anyone else hoping to use this on Linux, a procedure
roughly similar to the one described here should get the rest of the
keys to do something useful:

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/Snapstream_firefly_mini

In brief, convince udev to give you a permanent symlink to the relevant
/dev/input/event node for the non-keyboard keys, then configure lirc to
use this as a 'receiver', and set up in the usual way.  Not actually as
painful as it sounds, at least by lirc standards[1].  Lirc's mceusb and
mceusb2 drivers seem to be a red herring for this one.


Kim
--

[1] Like X, lirc is one of those things you need to fiddle with so
infrequently that you've forgotten all the gotchas by the time you next
have to deal with it.