Re: USB IR Receivers That Work With Lirc

[Stefan Lippers-H. <s....@gm...>]

Hi

On 2015-10-08, Kirk Bocek wrote:
> On 10/8/2015 1:14 PM, Stefan Lippers-Hollmann wrote:
> > On 2015-10-08, Bengt Martensson wrote:
> >> On 10/07/15 21:09, Kirk Bocek wrote:
[...]
> Now this is the device that started me off on this hunt:
> 
> http://www.ebay.com/itm/Lenovo-RC2604315-01BG-Media-Center-Remote-Control-USB-IR-Receiver-OVU710018-01-/251421736049?
> 
> It was recommended to me on the MythTV-users list and I bought one. 
> However I could not get it to work with LIRC. First, it installs as a 
> keyboard device. So I was told to disable that with a udev rule. Still 
> it didn't work. Then I tried patching mceusb.ko with the manufacturer 
> and device IDs (which were not present.) This caused a kernel crash on 
> loading.

It's basically impossible to guess based on that information, but what
can be found on the internet isn't very promising (as in suggesting 
that it's one more of those devices that only emulate keyboard/ mouse).

Things to start debugging would involve:
- booting without it being attached
- save the output of "lsmod" to a file
- connect the IR receiver
- save the output of "lsmod" to another file and compare, perhaps some
  kernel module had been autoloaded.
- check the last ~dozen of lines in the "dmesg" output, those should
  tell what the kernel has to tell about your device.
- check the output of "cat /sys/class/rc/rc0/protocols" (could also be 
  rc1, rc2, etc.), to see if it's supported by the RC_CORE subsystem.
- check the output of "lsinput" and "cat /proc/bus/input/devices"
- use your IR receiver's USB IDs for searching the web.

None of this is a solution, nor the full story, just something to get 
started.

From what I've seen, this device seems to behave very similar to the 
Ortek one mentioned before, in which case it wouldn't be very nice to
work with on a desktop system. For emulated keyboards, inputlirc can
be slightly easier to work with (as in easier to attain exclusive 
access to the device node), but it doesn't help that much.

> I tried ir-keytable for testing, but maybe not with each of your cases. 
> But unless I can get a driver loaded, I don't see how I can do lirc mode.

Looking at ir-keytable is only useful if your receiver has an RC_CORE 
based driver.

Regards
	Stefan Lippers-Hollmann