Fun with LIRC
I have successfully updated my bedroom MythTV frontend part way.I did an upgrade using YUM and now running Fedora 14. I did not update MythTV yet since the server is running v.23 and have to update it first. All went well except having to fiddle with updating the NVIDIA driver by hand.
While I was tinkering, I set up LIRC to control the TV and Cable box as well as MythTV. The TV did not have a remote with it and it turns out Olivia's codes are a bit weird. The remote that came with the Comcast STB worked, but not well. The universal remote I was using with Myth had the same issues but did not work with the STB. I wanted to have only one remote control everything, so what I did was set the universal remote to a code that nothing was using (RCA I think) and had LIRC send commands to the TV and STB using irexec and some irsend scripts. I use a home brew transmitter and old Packard Bell receiver.. I was having a lot of issues with errors that seemed to be coming from problems with the serial port. I ended up switching to the earlier mentioned test machine and that seemed to clear most of it up.
Now what I have is:
Remote
V
LIRC
V V V
MythTv - STB - TV
Ex. when I send Volume Up, LIRC receives it then sends the proper codes out to the TV.
A bit of a hassle, and a slight delay in each action, but the function is so much better with only one remote!
By the way, I was able to pull the hard drive and simply switch machines, even though one was Intel and one AMD. Ever try and do this with WinXP??????? (big pain!!)
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Computers everywhere!
I am planning to do an upgrade of MythTV soon and playing with the latest Fedora 14 before I break every thing. I have a spare computer at the moment to play with, but thought I would take a moment to list the computers running around here now for reference. I will be referring to several of them in the next few posts. They aren't all that special, but I will detail the highlights.Starting where internet comes in:
Old Compaq DeskPro P2 POS (not "point of sale!!")
Not sure what is in it, but it keeps on working, so I don't want to touch it!
Running SmoothWall 3 with DSL modem in passive mode.
P4 2.66GHz Win XP (yes, I still need XP for stuff)
MB HP? salvaged from trash.
AMD ?? Unbuntu and EMC a few versions old.
Again, not broke, don't want to mess with it!
Also dual boots Puppy Linux 4.31
It has pull out drives, so there is also one with XP and an older demo of MACH 3
P4 2.66GHz Fedora 11
Another dumpster find now with 160G and 500G HD's
General use machine and stores videos.
Gatway P4HT 3.00GHz
She needs XP for shcool, but I snuck in multi-booting F12, and Puppy!
Dell P4HT 3.00GHz
80G, 160G, and 500G Drives
GeForce 8400GS to RCA 60" DLP connected on DVI
Hauppauge 350 and 250 tuners
Fedora 12 and MythTV back end and main front end
Medion X10 RF remote and home brew serial IR blaster
Medion P4HT 3.00GHz
GeForce 4MX to Olivia 30" LCD on DVI and modulator to old TV
Home brew serial transceiver
Fedora 12 and MythTV front end
HP Celleron old main desktop XP and Puppy
HP AMD XP 3000+ current testing box
ProGear touch screen "toy" Puppy 2.14
Dell P3 laptop XP and Puppy
Stack of old P2 and P3 over my head for use in prototypes.
The funny thing is I think my Droid 2 may be more powerful than some of my computers!
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Rain Barrel control
I think I now have a working control for the rain barrel, with a moisture probe. This will prevent watering if the ground is already wet. I have a new PC board made and tested and just waiting for the weather to break a bit to get the barrel hooked up to test it. If all goes well I will add the design info to the rain barrel page soon. The whole control is pretty basic with only one adjustment for the probe so it should be cheap and reliable. Just don't expect any bells and whistles.No comments - Edit - Delete
Comcast, Schedules Direct, and MythTV
My MythTV is set up with 2 tuner cards, one is connected to my main cable box, and the other was connected straight to the basic cable. I have LIRC control the cable box. Not long ago, Comcast issued digital set top boxes (STB) for all its services, even basic cable. I then had to add the STB and have LIRC control it as well.On Schedules Direct I had 2 listing, basic, and digital. Comcast has now added more channels on the STB that are above and beyond Basic (like SyFi and Sprout, but not BBC or movie channels if you have a digital package) so I wanted to be able to tune them as well on MythTV. I set both inputs to use the digital listing since Schedules Direct only lets you have each linup once, and deleted the unavailable channels from the STB input. On the next run of mythfilldatabase, the channels were added back. Since I don't want Myth to try to record on a tuner / channel that doesn't exist, I wanted a way to automaticly clear the channels. I read in a forum where somone ran a cron job to do this for over the air channels they could not receive, but I am trying something different. I found that when mythfilldatabase ran, the "finetune" field was set to "NULL" on the new channels. All I needed to do is delete any channels that matched this. In mythtv-setup there is a setting for "mythfilldatabase program" that I set to a batch file "mythfilldatabase.sh" which contains:
#!/bin/sh
mythfilldatabase
mysql -u XXXX -pXXXX -e"delete from mythconverg.channel where finetune is NULL;"
XXXX are username and password
This way every time MythTV automaticly runs the command, it will clear the new channels on it's own.
Of course, I will not have new channels that I may want added, but I can check for them on my own and run mythfilldatabase manually.
NOTE: if you use MythWeb, finetune will show as a blank (NULL) the first time making the new channels easy to find, but if you save changes, it will set it to "0"
I am going to let this run a few days and see how it goes!
One side benefit is since there is only on listing to download, mythfilldatabase runs in less time using cached data for the second tuner.
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