TiVo Community Forums Archives - can you send infrared commands via bash prompt?

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can you send infrared commands via bash prompt?
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Posted by: wejones

Not sure if subject makes sense, but it occurred to me that I might be able to control the little infrared device that plugs into the TIVO via commands at the bash prompt.
Ie, I'd like to write a script that sends an IR signal say to my VCR or to an IR video switch or some other device.
I know it might be difficult to figure out the proper data to send, but I was just curious whether there was a program on the TIVO that actually sent the data over the IR that I could experiment with? I did a quick scan through the files on the TIVO, and see something in SBIN named "irprog", that I thought might possibly be such a program, and also I see a couple of files such as "irmicro.hex" that I thought might possibly be data for codes that the TIVO knows? I also saw a device in /dev called "kfir" . Are any of these things used for the purposes I'm looking for? I was hoping to just be able to use a command with a data variable, or send data to a device.
Anyway, it seems like someone would have tried something like this before, but a quick search didn't yield anything, so I'm curious whether anyone knows how to control the IR blaster thing? Or is it more complicated than I'm hoping?
thanks in advanc.

Posted by: mrtickle

Bump!

Any luck with this? I'd like to do something similar. I want to be able to use TiVo's IR emitters to send a "backup" keypress to my satellite STB once every minute, at 30 seconds past the minute.

(Here in the UK the broadcasters have started using onscreen graffiti generated by the STB which wrecks recordings, but can be removed by pressing "backup" if you're there live).

TiVoweb's remote module doesn't seem to be the solution because I don't want the script to press one of the keys which is on the tivo remote. I only want to tell tivo to fire some IR out of its emitter. Help! :)

Posted by: wejones

I got some replies in another forum,
http://www.************.com/forum/s...&threadid=19989

but I haven't figured it out yet.
It was suggested that to send the commands out the remote, that something like
cat (commandstring) >/dev/ttyS0
where the commandstring might be a file with the data for the remote button.
A couple methods were also suggested for reading data from the remote to find out what to put in the file sent. One of these involved first killing myworld then directing from ttyS0 to the screen, but when I tried to do this, I apparently didn't completely kill myworld, and it didn't work for me. Perhaps I should have re-started with myworld false instead of trying to kill the process. In addition, it looked like it might only be detecting the TIVO remote, not other remotes. You might try looking at the above thread, and see if you understand it better than I did. Please post if you figure it out.

Posted by: embeem

Write a C program to request control of the serial and then talk to the IR device; you don't need to kill myworld but you do need to understand the command set the IR uses.

Posted by: mrtickle

Thanks for the help. Sounds a bit hard! :(

Posted by: RC3105

you were expecting some of that pixie dust from the commercial maybe?

--
Riley

Posted by: mrtickle

:D