Wake up for OpenELEC

[NickSoapdish]

My general question is - Is it possible for flirc to wake up OpenELEC? But there are a few things at play:

From what I've seen, it seems like shutting down/booting up OpenELEC is the most popular thing to do since boot time is insanely fast. However, my computer (ASRock Ion 330Pro) can't power on from USB (as best I can tell) so I'm wanting to put OpenELEC to sleep so it can be woken up by a button press. I had this set up in Windows 7 using EventGhost and it worked pretty well most of the time. I'm very new to OpenELEC and don't have much experience with trying to get a remote to behave with it, so flirc seems like a good thing for me. I've read about some issues with the Eden builds of OpenELEC having issues with going to a sleep state, and I'm not sure if this has been resolved.

Support for waking/sleeping is in beta in flirc and I haven't tried out the beta firmware yet, so I'm posing the question to those who may be testing it.

To make things worse, I currently can't test anything, my Harmony remote isn't registered with the Harmony software because of a warranty replacement issue. I'm in contact with Logitech support but it is a slow process.

If anyone knows if this set up is possible, or how to implement it, I'm really interesting in the details, thanks!

[digitalb0y]

Welcome to the Flirc forums!

See my response to your post on the XBMC forums. Basically if you want to use IR to wake a motherboard that doesn't powering up on USB, use suspend or hibernate. If you're okay with using an Android app or another computer wake your XBMC box over LAN, you can use complete shutdowns. You don't need a delay like you have with EventGhost because XBMCbuntu/OpenELEC will start XBMC after everything it depends on has already started for the most part, and it's okay to just suspend instead of full shutdown because there are tools for automatically updating the library and Linux suspends/wakes on USB very cleanly.

I promised a crash course on setting up wake-on-device on Ubuntu a while back but was waiting on a replacement unit from Jason and some additional tests. Now that it's working consistently I'll try and put that together tonight or tomorrow. There are good guides on the topic in the XBMC wiki as well.

[NickSoapdish]

Fantastic! Thanks digitalb0y! I replied to the xbmc forum also. OpenELEC has been pretty cool, but I'm running into a couple issues that I can't get resolved, so I'm eager to try out XBMCbuntu to see if I can get the smoothest experience possible.

Is it possible to suspend/wake XBMCbuntu right now with flirc, or is it best to wait until the firmware supports it?

[digitalb0y]

I'm eager to try out XBMCbuntu to see if I can get the smoothest experience possible.

I'm not going to lie, it took me some time to set some things with XBMCbuntu as well. For example, 5.1 sound over HDMI was a bit of a challenge. Then I had to manually configure Wake on LAN (in BIOS), wake on device (instrux coming shortly), bluetooth pairing for my keyboard and trackpad so I can use a web browser when I want to launch one, etc. You can really get sucked into tweaking a system like this for a long time. But in general, there's a lot more Ubuntu left in XBMCbuntu than there is in OpenELEC, so as long as your system is decent I think your logic here is sound. My system is extremely flexible and is still nice and quick. The only advantage I can see for OpenELEC is that it is probably faster on older hardware, but XBMCbuntu really is a great balance of Ubuntu goodies and streamlined, minimal approach.

Is it possible to suspend/wake XBMCbuntu right now with flirc, or is it best to wait until the firmware supports it?

On Linux I have trouble with the beta Flirc firmwares that include support for the wake command, but I don't really need them either. Firmware 1.0 doesn't interfere with the suspend command, so I configure the wake on device using a handful of commands on the Linux box, and then ANY mapped button on my remote will wake the XBMCbuntu box, as it's basically setup as if I want to be able to press any keyboard key to wake it up. The upside of firmware 1.0 is that it's nice and stable. The downsides are that I can't make it so that only a single button mapped to 'wake' will wake it up, and it takes a little longer to respond to the other buttons with firmware 1.0 than it did using the wake command and one of the beta fw_wake firmware versions. Jason's working on better implementations of wake for Linux, but you don't have to wait for newer firmware to start playing.

[NickSoapdish]

I have a pretty basic set up right now, using my TV for audio output and have a mini RF keyboard to use when needed so hopefully set up won't be too difficult. Not as easy as Windows and maybe not as easy as OpenELEC, but there are resources I can look up when I hit a roadblock.

I very much look forward the wake-on-device write up, please let me know when that is available!

[NickSoapdish]

I installed XBMCbuntu on my ASRock Ion 330Pro yesterday with great success. Everything is up and running very well, and required very little configuration for my basic set up. An old MCE remote even worked out of the box - I'm using this remote now while I'm waiting to hear back from Logitech support because the wrong remote was deactivated.. grrr...

There seems to be an issue with the computer waking up from sleep - if I put it to suspend from the menu, I'm not able to wake it up from the remote. If I press the button on the computer, it seems to boot up as if it were powered off.

I did change the setting in XBMC to "suspend" (I forget the name of it, power event maybe?) and that didn't seem to change things.

Will this be resolved by setting up wake-on-device on Ubuntu?

[jason]

Did you try with the stock firmware? Or have you tried the beta?

[digitalb0y]

Also, what do you see when you try the following command?

cat /proc/acpi/wakeup

I finally got a little bit of a guide started:

See if it's enough to get you started. If not, post the output of that command here and we can start troubleshooting from there.

[NickSoapdish]

Finally got my Harmony working again! Logitech had to reset it and it took them FOREVER to get it done. Silly question, but what key to I map in the Flirc software to the power button on the Harmony remote for wake/sleep purposes?

[Chris!]

Probably "s"

http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Keyboard

There maybe a more direct way (but I don't know it :))

[digitalb0y]

Yeah, I use S on my power button. With most skins that makes it necessary to press a couple more buttons to actually shut down, but it also gives you a quick path to your settings or whatever else your skin has built into the shutdown menu.

[NickSoapdish]

This may be a dumb question, but can I map the s button to the power "all off" button? Ideally I'd like to have the computer wake up when I switch to the xbmc activiy and go to sleep if I power off or switch to the watch tv activity. Any one have experience in mapping a harmony remote this way?

[burke]

If I understand correctly you would like to press button on your remote to power off your xbmc machine - put it to sleep

I don't have harmony but i think the way it works is that when you press "all off" it sends code for itch device that is programmed on your remote.

Doing this in means of connecting your remote and flir should not be a problem - cause you connect your power button for pc with some key on your keyboard.

If you connect it with letter s - that wont work ok cause it will only bring up "power" menu and you need to confirm sleep command with additional enter.

I promised Chris to make a short how to and promise top do it as soon as possible. :(

Ok there are a lot of hidden functions that can be accessed directly, for those functions to work you need to have keyboard.xml file in your xbmc (there is a folder called keyboard under

user data)

Now you chose some button on your keyboard that is not in use by xbmc already - lets say f2.

You copy text below to any text editor (I use notepad++ it works 10+ and it is free) and save as keyboard.xml. Put it in keyboard folder, you restart your box from now on when you press f2 xbmc should go to sleep.

be careful not to use any button already in use from xbmc - cause you will override defoult action!

<!--Template XBMC keyboard file-->

<keymap>

  <global>

	<keyboard>

	  <f2>Suspend</f2>

	</keyboard>

  </global>

</keymap>


[/html]

BTW I have Openelec on my machine - Zotac H55 MBO - I wake up my machine with any key on remote.

[NickSoapdish]

I've set up the wake command as DigitalBoy stated and it seems to be working well. I tried to set up the suspend command that burke mentioned above, but am having problems.

If I try to map the "All Off" power button on my harmony to the f2 key, I get an error that the button is already mapped - I get the Button Already Exists message from flirc.

What I'd like to have happen is if I press the All Off button on the remote, XBMC is suspended and the TV et al are turned off. Is this possible using firmware 1.0?

[Chris!]

You can't map the same remote button press to two different commands for Flirc (as it would send both commands).

At the moment your all-off button is mapped to "s" right?

Delete the "s" key using the Flirc GUI then try adding F2 as described by Burke. Unless I've misunderstood something (have I?)

Pleasant regards

Chris!

[NickSoapdish]

Thanks Chris, I didn't think the button had been mapped before but it was.

I'm on the right track now to get things going but I think I need to look at the harmony settings a bit to see if I can prevent it from sending extra power signals to the computer when it is off - for instance if I just have the TV and cable box on and power them all down, sometimes it wakes the computer up.

[NickSoapdish]

In my current set up, I have F2 mapped and that is working well to put the PC to sleep. I'm using V1 firmware, so any button press wakes up the PC. This is working too well though, because when I press the Watch TV button on the Harmony remote, the PC wakes up. It is like the Harmony remote sends a signal to the PC thinking it is part of the activity although it isn't, just the TV and cable box are part of the Watch TV activity and should be powered on.

Is there a setting within the Harmony software I should be looking for?

[Chris!]

In my current set up, I have F2 mapped and that is working well to put the PC to sleep. I'm using V1 firmware, so any button press wakes up the PC. This is working too well though, because when I press the Watch TV button on the Harmony remote, the PC wakes up. It is like the Harmony remote sends a signal to the PC thinking it is part of the activity although it isn't, just the TV and cable box are part of the Watch TV activity and should be powered on.

Is there a setting within the Harmony software I should be looking for?

In this case I think it is the Flirc responding to any IR signal (so nothing the harmony can do about it). Your best bet would be to wait for Jason to release a firmware where the wake up only occurs from one specified button. I have not ETA on this though.

I'm assuming the Flirc is doing great otherwise?

Pleasant regards,

Chris!

[jason]

Have you tried the beta 6 firmware? That should allow you to link only one button with waking up. People have had success with either v1.0 or v6 beta for this sleep issue. Thanks

[NickSoapdish]

I was going to try out the beta firmware but was met with a surprise - the Flirc had been unplugged. I'm thinking it was my 3 year old daughter, which means it could be anywhere in the house... if I ever find it I'll post back with my results, thanks for the help guys.