Tips on getting Harmony/USB-UIRT working?

[stottle]

As the subject says, I've got a Harmony remote and the USB-UIRT. Some of the commands are converted to events like this:
USB_UIRT.Mce.Record
some of them are converted to events like this:
USB_UIRT.Unknown.4C3F0FD7AFFFFCB70

Some of commands seem to do both, either one after the other on one press, or change randomly between presses.

I know there are a bunch of MCE remote variants, and you can only configure the remotes you (or users) have access to. So I'm not complaining, but I would like to fix this. My questions:

1) Is there are device from the Harmony configuration s/w that I can select that is already configured (gives USB-UIRT.Mce. messages)? There are a ton of configurations, it's impossible to tell which ones are good!
2) If there's nothing I can use "out-of-the-box", how do I update the code to map messages to events? I can read most of the eg code, but I'm not sure what the ir messages look like, so the decode stuff is hard for me to interpret. My intent would be to end up with named events rather than hex events.

Thanks,
Brett

[stottle]

Ok, I'll answer my own questions, in case anyone else runs into similar problems.

1) I found the following device for Harmony was set up pretty well:
Device - Computer=>Media Center PC
Manufacturer - Microsoft
Model - Windows Vista Media Center PC
I had to set two things up for this to work well. First, in the USB-UIRT settings, I had to check the "Pass short repeat codes as enduring events" option. Second, I had to go into the Rc6.py code and change this line:

Code: Select all

if not (700 < data[1] < 1100):

to

Code: Select all

if not (600 < data[1] < 1100):

The range for data[1] was 650/700/750, and it would only match if it was 750. This caused the randomness in the results. It didn't look like any other decoders used this range.

2) The Rc6.py code maps the ir command to the mce commands, using a dictionary. I've also got a zalman remote and a powerspec remote that use the NEC decoder. I want to add a mapping for the zalman, but I don't care about the powerspec. It seems like there ought to be a different place to put this map, other than the NEC decoder code. Maybe the plugin itself could load a config file with mappings?

I'm going to ponder that, but if anyone else has any opinions, I'd be curious to hear thoughts.

Brett

[stottle]

I also added the following codes in Rc6.py:

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    0x800F0450: "Radio",
    0x800F0427: "Aspect",
    0x800F044C: "Audio",
    0x800F044D: "Subtitle",

Brett

[Livin]

I'm going to try this to see what changes it makes... mine was working fine but if it is better

[Livin]

FYI for others trying this. It did not work for me. It rendered control 98% unresponsive.

I have to change back to...

Code: Select all

if not (700 < data[1] < 1100):

[stottle]

Livin-

The way EG handles IR codes is it has a list of different decoder algorithms. It takes the IR sequence and tries to match against each decoder in sequence, stopping if it finds a match. If it does find a match, it also pushes that decoder to the front of the list, expecting other codes to most likely be from the same remote.

All the code change above does is increase the tolerance for matching against Rc6, the coding MCE remotes use. So if your system became unresponsive, it means that a code that used to match as something else now matches as MCE - either correctly or incorrectly. If you previously had an Unknown event as a trigger, and it now shows up as an Mce event, it will no longer trigger the action, but might be a better result in the long run. If the remote is using a different coding and it matches incorrectly, that is certainly a mistake in the change.

Would you be willing to test a remote button that works in your current config and not with my update, and tell me what event it produces in each case? That would help me understand what's going on a lot better.

Thanks,
Brett