IR blaster unreliably controlling my Sky box

[brewston]

Hiya

I've finally got a picture & sound out of my Sky box into Sage. I sorted out XMLTV (I understand the difference between logical and physical channels now) and it kinda works

After a few channel changes though, it starts getting them wrong. Sometimes it will fail to send a digit (So I get 13 instead of 123) the next change then makes things worse by appending the first digit onto the previous (uncompleted) change. The problem can be seen outside Sage with the blaster wizard. I'm thinking it could be :

o plain old unreliable hardware
o the sensor positioning is hyper sensitive (such that some digits get received but some dont - it doesn't behave consistently though)
o The Sky box needs me to adjust some of hauppauge's advanced options (the delays etc)

Whats the best way to make my channels changes reliable ? I searched the archives and found a reference to Sky.ir file - what does that do ?

Thanks

Tim

[ron.smythe]

Hi Tim,

I had the same problem for years with IR, opting in the end to use the RF2 port on my sky digibox. To do this you will need more hardware, but the end result is perfect channel changes.

So to do this you need:

1. The channel changer device itself 'rf2Link' which plugs into the back of the digibox via the RF2 output. (http://www.pacelink.co.uk/rf2link.htm)

2. A USBUIRT, plugs into the USB port of the sage server and can either send IR signals accross the air, or can be used with a 'rf2Link' to send ir accross the RF2 cable. (http://www.usbuirt.com/)

3. The USBUIRT is a multi zone device, meaning you can control more then one digibox, it does this thought the use of a stereo headphone jack at the rear of the USBUIRT, which can be split into 2 with the use of a STEREO to MONO phone jack (http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?...086&doy=13m12), with thoses being Zone1 and Zone2 and Zone3 is the front IR blaster. I tend NOT to use Zone3, but instead connect a 'rf2Link' device to each of the MONO (zone1 and 2) outputs of the USBUIRT.


That's about it, the USBUIRT is support by Sage, and I can supply the control files if you want them

As a note the '.ir' files are the control files used by sage to convert channel numbers to IR commands.

I hope this helps!

[brewston]

Thanks for the advice.

I'd done more searching and found people talking about this :

http://www.heenan.me.uk/control-sky-from-pc/

Does your setup utilise EXETunePlugin ? I was wondering how tricky that was ?

I've looked at USB-UIRT before but it seems complicated with girder involved (Im loathed to introduce an extra piece of software into the stack)

Tim

[doc]

I have a usbirt and have it sat about 6 inches in front of my 2 sky boxes.
One is sky+ and one the multiroom box. They have different codes for the remotes so theres no problems with it changing the wrong box. It changes channels very reliably.

I like the idea of the pacelink gadget as I can then hide all of the wires round the back, but the usbirt is reliable enough on its own.

[ron.smythe]

Tim,

The USBUIRT is support by sage (Sage has a direct interface to the usbuirt via a DLL in the sage directory), thus no external EXE needed, also means setting it up is a matter of stopping the sage server, installing the usbuirt, then setting up your video source to use the usbuirt as the changer, and teaching the remote codes to sage via the usbuirt.

Ron.

[brewston]

Just to follow up this thread.

The Joseph Heenan device works very well. I had some slight problems with exetuner (didn't seem to like having the service running, had to stop it) but other than that I'm happily changing channels on my Sky box via Sage

Cheers

Tim