Harmony, FLIRC and VDR

[daubsi]

Hello,

 

I am a new user of FLIRC. I bought the adapter to remotely control my VDR running on a Raspberry Pi with my Harmony 785 remote control.

I loaded the Panasonic TV on the remote as recommended in another forum and mapped all relevant buttons using the "Full keyboard" preset.

 

At first I wrote down all recognized keyboard keys in VDR using an USB keyboard directly connected to the Pi. Then I programmed these keys using the FLIRC GUI on OSX. The FLIRC has FW 3.3 on it.

 

I held the remote approx. 1m fron the FLIRC dongle during training of the commands.

 

When I now put the FLIRC dongle in the Pi, it indeed DOES recognize my remote control key presses, but only if I aim it perfectly in line to the dongle and am not more than 1 meter away from the dongle.

 

I tried fiddling with the sensitivity settings in the FLIRC and Harmony configuration software but it didn't help anything.

 

What's going on here? On the forum I've read that the FLIRC is very sensitive and even recognizes key presses from another room?

[yawor]

Hi,

 

The distance during the programming was probably too small and the signal is too strong and causes overdrive of the IR receiver. The minimal distance of 1 meter is more of a rough guess than a specific value. You will get better results moving much further away from the Flirc during programming. You can also point the remote at the ceiling instead of Flirc directly so the signal received by the Flirc will be the one bounced off the ceiling.

[jason]

Yes, absolutely, point it at the ceiling. Flirc is very sensitive.

[daubsi]

I tried what you said and can say, that the FLIRC dongle reliably receives key presses from the Harmony up to 15ft away, when the dongle is connected to my Mac (where I trained it). I even pointed the remote opposite of the dongle and it still received the events.

 

However, as soon, as I've put it in the Raspberry, reception is sub-par: no further away than 3ft, direct aim needed, very often key presses are missed.

I tried it on two different PIs in order to ensure that it is not a software problem on the Pi I used it until now. One Pi is running MLD (VDR client) the other Raspbmc. Also in Raspbmc I can hardly control the OSD.

 

Of course, I also browsed the VDR and XBMC forums, but what I've read here is that many other have the problem with the FLIRC dongle as well :-(

I will try to use an USB extension cable tonight to put the dongle directly in front of the TV, but if it still not working as expected I am sorry to say, that I have no use for the FLIRC :(  though it is a really neat product