Re: USB Receiver Advice?

[Bengt M. <bu...@be...>]

On 10/22/17 15:20, Paul Gration wrote:
>      > Personally, I consider life too short to address the needs of
>     those who "may
>      > not even have a second/desktop system to use".
> 
>     That's a lot of people these days... More & more people every day are
>     relying on a phone/phablet/tablet and some kind of media player be it
>     roku, tiny mini-pc running kodi, one of those usb android devices,
>     dedicated htpc, etc. If you're not interested none of that matters
>     though.
> 

Don't get me wrong. I am not against supporting Android etc (cf. 
https://github.com/bengtmartensson/harctoolboxbundle/issues/81 . (There 
is a "Help wanted" label on it...) What I am saying is that providing a 
CLI program like irrecord (or even a better version thereof) is not a 
very smart way to achieve this.


> This was the thinking that led me to work on a web UI to manage, control 
> and stream output of LIRC programs back in 2013/14 as part of a project 
> for a course I was studying at the time. Demo is here:
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbUA6lHOAEw

First of all, why a Web thingy when you need to connect your hardware to 
the client anyhow? Web applications are there for not having to install 
anything, but here you need hardware, that needs drivers, possibly even 
kernel drivers... contradiction?? Installing hardware is "in general" 
much more of hassle than a "normal" program.

Secondly (of course I am biased here), I think it looks very pale in 
comparison with IrScrutinizer. It has all the problems and quirks of 
irrecord. The initial learning phase ("Please keep pressing...  ") is an 
annoyance (not needed by IrScrutinizer). The application does not 
identify the signal, nor does it measure frequency. It forces an 
unnatural linear work procedure upon the user (type name, press button, 
click mouse, ... -- advantageous if you have a large number > 2 of 
hands; difficult or impossible to back up to fix mistakes).  Etc.

Please do not get me wrong; I do not want a "mine is better than yours" 
discussion.

> There is a project that provides irsend functionality in much the same 
> way which I gather is used quite a bit:
> 
> https://github.com/alexbain/lirc_web

As was said before, this is another irsend.

How do you guys like the irsend client within IrScrutinzer? (Sending hw 
->Lirc; supports the TCP socket (not the Unix domain socket) only, i.e. 
must start lircd with the -l flag).)

The Python implementation Lirconian (available in PyPi
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/lirconian/0.2.1) (thanx to Alec for 
feedback and some code) is basically a demo on how to write such a 
program cleanly.

> Nowadays I tend to use the CEC functionality of my TV to control 
> connected devices (Kodi, BluRay etc) so I haven't given it much thought 
> for a long time.

Not now... "off topic".

> It might be an idea to develop something on top of IrScrutinizer, 
> allowing access from a mobile/tablet/any browser if it's something that 
> people could make use of..

Kewl. Have a look at JGirs ("IrScrutinizer as a server") 
https://github.com/bengtmartensson/JGirs . Turning THAT into a web 
application would ROCK!

Greetz,

Bengt