Harmony One Remote with XBMC running on Ubuntu

Gemaakt op 25 mei 2010 ¬ 22:26h.PascalGeen reacties »

Are you wondering how you can get your remote controller like the Harmony One running together with XBMC on Ubuntu?

Well here is the answer if your HTPC has an IRtrans based receiver inside.

Start by downloading the irtrans server from: http://www.irtrans.de/en/download/linux.php

Unpack these file and run the install.sh script. This puts everything you need in the directory /usr/local/irtrarns/

Run irtrans in the following way:

sudo /usr/local/irtrans/irserver64 -loglevel 4 -debug_code /dev/ttyUSB0

Assuming you have a 64bits os. Leave the 64 if you do not have a 64 bits operating system.

And press some buttons on your remote like the Harmony One. If all is ok you should see the keys you are pressing. So if you press pause you should see something like pause appear on the screen..

If you do see the keys you pressed press ctrl-c now to stop the program.

Next you install the ‘lirc’ package by using:

sudo apt-get install lirc

However we do not need this program to actually start so we also do the following:

/etc/init.d/lirc stop
update-rc.d -f lirc remove

If you fail to do so the irtrans server will not start as lirc is conflicting with this package…

Now we have to make sure that the irtrans server is started at boot time. So save the following file as /etc/init.d/irtrans

#! /bin/sh
#

PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/irtrans/
DAEMON=/usr/local/irtrans/irserver64

# Arguments to irtrans
#
ARGS="-start_clock  -daemon /dev/ttyUSB0"

test -x $DAEMON || exit 0

case "$1" in
  start)
    echo -n "Starting deferred execution scheduler: irtrans"
    start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --exec $DAEMON -- $ARGS
    echo "."
    ;;
  stop)
    echo -n "Stopping deferred execution scheduler: irtrans"
    start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --exec $DAEMON -n irserver64
    echo "."
    ;;
  reload)
    echo "Not implemented."
    ;;
  force-reload|restart)
    sh $0 stop
    sh $0 start
    ;;
  *)
    echo "Usage: /etc/init.d/irtrans {start|stop|restart|force-reload|reload}"
    exit 1
    ;;
esac

exit 0

And execute the following commands:

chmod a+x /etc/init.d/irtrans
/etc/init.d/irtrans start

Next start

irw

And test some more with the remote control. Once again you should see what you press on your remote control. If this also works like a charm (and it should) press ctrl-c once again to stop irw.

Next you have to map the remote controller to XBMC.

To do this put the following content in ~/xbmc/userdata/Lircmap.xml (press ctrl-right mouse button to save this file)

Now start up xbmc and everything should work… Also if you don’t have a Harmony One remote but you do have a regular mediacenter remote it should also work…

Be Sociable, Share!