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What *exactly* is the Flirc?


jonathanjo

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I'm sure this product is great, but What exactly is it?

I know that running a small company is very hard.  But documentation and website really need some work to build a bit more confidence beyond "it's marvelous and will solve your problem".  As everybody knows, the modern TVs, meda centres, and their remotes are borderline unusable.  Is this different?  Will it really help? 

I'm certain it's great (all Flircs other products are) but I'm trying to understand what it's going to be great at, Do I have to buy one to find out the answers?

It can be very difficult from within the company to know what's confusing to people who've never seen it before. "Famliarity Blindness", and so in a spirit of making a list of things which you might want to address:

  1. It's described as something to control your media centre with your remote control.
  2. But the hardware image only shows a transmitter (image upload seems not to work, it's here https://flirc.com/image/catalog/sliderNewHardware.jpg)
  3. Configurations are saved "on your device".  Do you mean the Flirc or the thing it's plugged into?
  4. The specs say there's a transmitter and a receiver with various ranges
  5. The manual says "it's a keyboard", but the drivers are 13 Mbyte, a keyboard should be usable without a driver.  Or did I miss something?
  6. The manual says "has its own IR protocol so it doesn't clash".  Must be transmitting then?  To what?
  7. The links to the generic linux software are all http, not https, which causes a download problem for many browsers
  8. If you edit the urls to be HTTPS, the certificates expired.
  9. Tried looking at the software, but it's a big installer blob.
  10. Tried looking at the SDK, really needs an overview to make sense of it.  I was hoping to see if there's some clear protocol for the meta-communications with the Flirc, or some way to use it as a generic IR comms device (could it IRDA, for example).

Thanks for any enlightenment.

Confused, but optimistic!

Jonathan.

 

 

 

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At its core, the Flirc USB is an IR receiver that interprets IR signals and transmits them to a computer or set-top box as keyboard keys or other computer commands. 

The Flirc USB is programmable using the Flirc App. You tell the flirc app the next IR signal the Flirc receives you want interpreted as a space bar press, for example, and then when you press a button on your remote, the IR signal it transmits will forever been recognized as a keyboard press by the Flirc, unless you re-program it. You can do this for basically as many IR codes as your given remote has.

Drivers are needed for programming. Once programming is done, they aren't needed anymore. And in fact if you plug the Flirc USB into something like a Android TV or Fire TV box, it'll just show up as a keyboard that sends the appropriate commands for those systems.

The transmitter on the Flirc exists, but is mostly not used by the average person.

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