Tag Archives: SKY

Troubleshooting the Big Button Infrared remote control with AnalysIR

Marco is  a volunteer for an organization (NSW Australia) that builds custom aids for people with disability, and has recently been looking at a project to create a ‘very large button’ IR remote control for a cable TV Set Top Box (STB). The custom unit needed basic functions (Channel Up/Down, Volume Up/Down and Power On/Off). Commercially available large button remotes have buttons that are still too small and/or they have too many buttons. Soon he hit a roadblock trying to capture some difficult Foxtel signals and searched all over the web looking for a solution. Needless to say, nothing worked out for him until he came across AnalysIR via Google. Once he started Troubleshooting the Big Button Infrared remote control with AnalysIR the root cause of his problems became obvious.

Troubleshooting the Big Button Infrared remote control with AnalysIR
Marco’s Big Button Infrared Remote control

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A hack for Hacks using AnalysIR

One of our users from Italy, Guido, was tasked with upgrading an old in-house WRC system to allow the team of Sport’s Journalists to access the rack of satellite receivers relaying the various sports events around the building.  The challenge is that all of the STB (Set Top Boxes) are located in a dedicated room away from the Journalist’s desks and it is impractical for them to manually change the stations when working to tight deadlines. Previously there was a system in place to remotely switch feeds, but Guido needed to upgrade the system to handle the ever growing number of devices and Infrared protocols. Luckily, he found AnalysIR during his research to implement ‘a hack for Hacks using AnalysIR‘.

Satellite Feed Rack
Satellite Feed Rack during testing

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Latest ‘New Year’ release of AnalysIR with full support for USB IR Toy and more.

Dublin, Ireland – 31st January 2014. We are happy to announce the latest ‘New Year’ release of AnalysIR to all our backers & supporters. Since the completion of the crowd-funding campaign on Indiegogo we have added over 125 updates and enhancements to AnalysIR, with more to come.

AnalysIR Screenshot
AnalysIR Screenshot

A major highlight of this release is full AnalysIR support for USB IR Toy from Dangerous Prototypes (V1 & V2 hardware) for decoding and resending IR signals at all common modulation frequencies. In our opinion, AnalysIR is now the premier GUI supporting DP’s IR toy, not to mention the Arduino, RPi, MSP430 F5529 LaunchPad (beta)  and more. A selection of enhancements in this latest release, include: Continue reading Latest ‘New Year’ release of AnalysIR with full support for USB IR Toy and more.

Follow up: Custom TV infrared remote control using Arcade style console

For anyone following the progress of our ‘Custom TV Infrared remote control’ for the SKY+ box, we received it back for some upgrading over the last week and tomorrow (weather permitting – there are lots of high winds in Europe today, with many flights being cancelled) it will be flown back to its owner, with several upgrades on board.

 

Custom SKY+ IR Remote control, by AnalysIR
Custom SKY+ IR Remote control, by AnalysIR

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Custom TV remote control using Arcade style console

  Following on from our previous blog post about SKY+ RC6 IR codes, we have now completed the project and are about to ship to its new owner – a friend of ours.

SR1We purchased a Sega megadrive Arcade style games console which was BNIB for €25 ($35) and disabled all of the built-in gaming functionality. We then wired up each of the 12 available switches (Joystick & Arcade style buttons) to the Arduino Nano which was placed onto an Arduino prototyping shield and mounted to the enclosure using ‘lots’ of hot glue. Note some of these consoles come with an additional 2 buttons, which can bring the total to 14. In addition, the joystick has 8 positions in total of which we used only 4 as it would be too difficult for the user to manage all eight. Continue reading Custom TV remote control using Arcade style console

Update: IR signal clean feature & news

After the great news of reaching the initial target on IGG today, I wanted to give a few more updates.

1: AnalysIR has been invited by one of the leading IR equipment manufacturers to join their global partner programme. We hope this will open up access to a potentially huge user base for AnalysIR gong forward with great benefits for both partners. This would not have been possible without the great support from our backers.

2: We wanted to update everyone on our progress with export in Global Caché command format. Well after some initial mistakes using IRremote to generate the signals for a SKY HD remote, we finally succeeded in verifying that the export works with GC equipment, with the help of one of our backers, who happens to have this equipment installed. (Unfortunately, we didn’t have a SKY remote control available)

As part of the debugging process in this exercise, we decided to implement a new feature, to clean up the recorded signal, which means that we can now export almost perfect signals from any signal decoded by AnalysIR, even if it is imported via another format. With this additional ‘Bonus Feature’, we can record or import a very poor signal and recondition it into a perfect signal for export – automatically. We believe our methodology for this could be patentable, but unfortunately we don’t have the resources for this, at this time.

The really good news is that AnalysIR played a key role in debugging & identifying the silly error we made initially.

So now AnalysIR can import & export in the following formats:

–  IRremote

–  IRLib

–  Pronto

–  Global Caché GC-100

–  Global Caché iTach (*)

–  Global Caché GC-IRL (*)

–  Global Caché GC-IRE (*)

(*) = Export not yet verified with physical device.

3: As we indicated just over a week ago, we are now implementing a feature freeze on AnalysIR from today. This will allow us to complete some ‘in-progress’ features and allow us to concentrate on testing, documentation & packaging AnalysIR for release. We would still like to hear any new feature requests from backers for inclusion in later releases & additional import/export formats. Just send us a comment, message via IGG or email.

Finally, we are considering adding some new perks over the next few days and may be retiring some of the existing perks. ….more later