Things I have learned

[greg]

I have been trying to program a remote for Kodi running under Ubuntu 14.40  There seems to be a genuine dearth of documentation on the Flirc so I finally gave up asking questions and started working with it.  The only real Flirc problem is the backspace key on the keyboard.  For some wired reason no matter how this one is programmed it seems to always come up 'ESC'   Since I am dealing with Kodi this really doesn't make much difference as the 'ESC' key works the same as the backspace in most instances.

So, the first thing I learned is that one can, for instance, program a remote using both the Kodi configuration, and the full keyboard configuration - Flirc just doesn't care!  The problem, which I find strange, is that if you program a key in the full keyboard mode whatever you program does not appear on the Kodi configuration and the opposite is also true.  So, if you want to test your remote you have to goto both configurations to see if your remote is putting out the right signal.  If, for instance, you program something from the full keyboard configuration, or any other, and then you goto another scheme and try and program the same key again, it lets you try and then tells you that its already used (or something like that).  

I now have a fairly functional way to program a remote.  I went up to Goodwill and bought 4 remotes, put batteries in them, and just had at it.  It takes me about 20 minutes to program a remote and test it.  I started off with a harmony 650 but quickly remember why I wasn't using it in the first place.  It was old and all the keys are not working so I just tossed that and moved onto the other remotes.  First thing I do is to list all the available keys on a given remote.  After than I goto the Kodi keymap http://kodi.wiki/view/Keyboard_controls and start at the top of both the remote keys and the aforementioned keymap.  There are a LOT of Kodi keys!  That being said I don't use them all.  I do not, for instance, use Kodi for live tv which uses up quite a few keys.  Anyway, I just start assigning keys.  I goto the Kodi configuration first and assign all those keys and then move onto the full keyboard to assign any other keys not included in the Kodi configuration.

Anyway, I also notice that Flirc can make things a bit easier if they were to support wireless as well as IR.  To go one step further would be to have a usb port on it so that one could simply plug in a usb keyboard and start programming the Flirc, same with the wireless.   As far as I can tell Flirc really doesn't care (except in the case of the strange backspace thing).  All it really does is remember the codes programmed into it for a specific remote/keyboard/whatever. 

I should also mention the configuration file thing.  The program really doesn't care about the name of the file but it DOES care about the extension.  The extension of a configuration file is .fcfg, without that the Flirc program will not recognize it.

Anyway, I thought I would try and write this down and send it off for the heck of it.