TechTalk

I am seriously getting frustrated, with this IR Transmitter, this is a vital part of my build and it is getting me under! I have gotten the PVR150’s IR Blaster to work, well as mentioned it blinks and it does appear to transmit when commanded to, but my DSTV decoder is not working!! I tried loads of scripts and still nothing, I used mark’s send_power_new, and it ran for about 10mins, blinking away as it should but still nothing, no response from the decoder…

I have no idea why, I have spoken to people who say it should work with DStv they have it up and running, and they’re convinced it should work I have read forums and posted but all response I get is that my device may not be configured correctly or the IR Blaster is not put in the correct place on the STB(set top box)

I then built my self a simple IR transmitter, one with only an IR led, 2k resistor and a diode, directly hookup to pins on a serial port plug, after reconfigure of lirc I could see it, with the help of a digi cam, that is was blinking away, but still no change on the DStv decoder.

Ordered components, built a better circuit, still no change… The I was fed up walk over to a windows box install WinLirc and tried the second “better” circuit, nothing nada, hooked up the “quick and dirty” one again, used the DSD910 lirc config and a commercial remote extender, fired up WinLirc and presto, It worked!

Jumped for joy plugged it out of the windows box, took it back to the MythTv/HTPC box, plugged it in, restarted, reconfigured loaded the exact same lirc.conf for the DSD910 remote, nothing, not even IR being transmitted, like in the previous instances, I really don’t hope I fried my serial port!!!

From all the experiments I can now deduce:

• The circuit of the “better” blaster is faulty, it is very possible was built on project board was to lazy to solder.
• The old “quick and dirty” diode, IR LED, and resistor, is working in terms of hardware only.
• From windows using the IR extender and WinLirc with the “quick and dirty” Transmitter I can send codes successfully.
• I think that the Remote extender I have may be the crux here, it amplifies the IR somewhat and maybe why I couldn’t get it to work the first time round!

My plan now is to try and get the PVR150’s blaster up and running again, don’t think this will be too hard, seeing as I have all the configuration in place including the firmware. if I can get it to work again I am going to do two things first run the send_power_new script again, positioning the blaster differently each time. Then try to get it working using the remote extender, placing the PVR150 Blaster on the remote extenders sensor, and trying again, maybe the problem was alignment and signal strength.

I know that one of my blasters work, albeit under Windows, this at least is some sane starting point, so I think I will try and get it to work again under Linux.

If this fails I am going to be building, a high power serial blaster I have all the components, so I think it should be easy and quick it really is a simple circuit to build. Then again test under windows and WinLirc, then do it all over and bring to Linux.

I need to get this working today, this is all that I need to do to get it running, everything else is working, well in terms of a functionality perspective some tweaks and niggles also needs to be sorted out…

Stayed tuned for more!

Bookmark me: