lirc-list

Hotplugging my USB IR receiver

[Andrew C. <and...@gm...>]

I have a Philips MCE remote with a USB receiver that I have working on
LIRC 0.8.0 on Ubuntu Dapper.  (I installed from source from the
instructions on http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/MCE_Remote.)

I'm having a problem with unplugging the receiver.  This is my laptop,
so I'm fairly frequently unplugging it.  When I plug it back in, I can
rerun lircd and irexec to get it working again, but is there a way to
get it to start working automatically when plugging it in (like e.g.
my USB mouse)?

Thanks for LIRC and the help,
Andrew

Re: Hotplugging my USB IR receiver

[Michael M. <mic...@gm...>]

Andrew Conkling wrote:

> I have a Philips MCE remote with a USB receiver that I have working on
> LIRC 0.8.0 on Ubuntu Dapper.  (I installed from source from the
> instructions on http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/MCE_Remote.)
> 
> I'm having a problem with unplugging the receiver.  This is my laptop,
> so I'm fairly frequently unplugging it.  When I plug it back in, I can
> rerun lircd and irexec to get it working again, but is there a way to
> get it to start working automatically when plugging it in (like e.g.
> my USB mouse)?

Perhaps you could use udev to (re)start lircd and irexec.

Unplug the device, run

  udevinfo -d >before

Plug the device in, run

  udevinfo -d >after
  diff -u before after

You should get a line with a "+" prepended - that's your device. The
left column before the "=" (without the "+") is the udev device path.

You can see all the device attributes with:

  udevinfo -a -p your_udev_device_path

Now go to /etc/udev/rules.d and look at the files there, e.g.
85-hdparm.rules:

ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="block", KERNEL=="hd[a-z]", \
        RUN+="/lib/udev/hdparm"

The first line is used to search for a specific device/action, and the
RUN entry tells udev what it should start when the rule matches.

Create a new file like 71-local.rules (the suffix has to be ".rules")
and add two lines similar to that 85-hdparm.rules, but which matches the
attributes of your device. Restart udev with "/etc/init.d/udev restart"
afterwards.

For a complete guide see
<http://www.reactivated.net/writing_udev_rules.html>, and/or see 
"man udev".

Regards...
		Michael

Re: Hotplugging my USB IR receiver

[Andrew C. <and...@gm...>]

On 7/10/06, Michael Mauch <mic...@gm...> wrote:
> Perhaps you could use udev to (re)start lircd and irexec.

Hi Michael,
I haven't had a chance to try this yet, but it looks promising.  I
just wanted to let you know that I appreciate your detailed response.

Cheers!
Andrew