Using LIRC to IRBlast/irsend with a Raspberry Pi 2 & an Irdroid Transciever

[Dan L. <da...@my...>]

Hello,

I've been trying unsuccesfully to send control my TV for the command 
line for the past week and have exhausted other avenues of help. LIRC 
seems to be one of the great mysteries of the internet. As the subject 
indicates I'm trying to do something that (I think) is fairly 
straightforward but I'm probably missing an obvious step due to me 
unfamiliarity with linux. I managed to get the USB irdroid Transciever 
working in about an hour on Windows using WinLirc but Raspbian has 
defeated me.

 From what I can divine from years old forum threads and my own repeated 
poking at it, the version of LIRC that ships with Raspbian is too old to 
have native support for the irtoy driver which, I believe, is the latest 
version of the linux driver (formerly known as irman) that works with 
the irdroid Transciever. As such I had a go at getting the latest 
version of LIRC from Git and make/installing it via the somewhat spare 
instructions on the LIRC webpage. It all _seemed_ to work.

However, I'm not entirely convinced that the 'from source' installed 
lirc is fully 'bedded in' in the same way as the old version I tried out 
from apt-get but there we are. What works now (that didn't appear to on 
the apt-get version of LIRC) is this command:

mode2 --driver irtoy

straight after a reboot. However just this:

mode2

on it's own tries to connect to /dev/lirc0 and achieves nothing and 
afterwards whatever it did seems to break 'mode2 -driver irtoy' until I 
reboot, which isn't that promising. Trying:

sudo lircd --device /dev/ttyACM0 --driver irtoy

errors because there is no /var/run/lirc directory. I have to mkdir it 
first each time I reboot which doesn't seem right. After I make the 
'lirc' directory and run the above command again it seems to be accepted 
(at least no console errors are reported) but trying:

irw

reports:

connect: No such file or directory

Trying:

irsend LIST AA59-00741A ""

reports:

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

What is a socket in this context? Any ideas what I have failed to 
install correctly to make this work? Should I just abandon all hope? 
Apologies if my formatting is awful I'm not a regular user of mailing lists.

Cheers,

Dan