USB Infrared Toy support

[ian]

Thanks for a great program. I used to use the freeware Girder, but the new one is a bit big. I've been using EventGhost ever since someone recommended it on Hack a Day.

I work on an open source project called the USB Infrared Toy. It's a USB IR receiver/transmitter with a few different modes.

Would any EventGhost developers be interested in supporting the IR Toy directly with a plugin? I can provide hardware to work with.

The protocol is defined here:
http://dangerousprototypes.com/docs/USB ... pling_mode

The WinLIRC driver source might also be helpful, and take care of a bunch of the grunt work:
http://winlirc.svn.sourceforge.net/view ... DLL/IRToy/

If there's a framework I can use to implement a new plugin myself, I'm willing to give it a try.

Thanks!

[ian]

Attached is a plugin for the USB IR Toy. We used the existing UIRT2 plugin and hacked it to work with the IR Toy.

The major difference is that the IR Toy uses 16bit data packets with 21.333us resolution. The UIRT (and most similar devices) use 8bit packets with 50us resolution.

It looks the the EventGhost IR decoder can be configured for any resolution (50.0 or 21.3, for example), but that it likes 8bit data only.

Our solution was to recalculate by multiplying by 21.333 then diving by 50 and send the lower byte. This isn't perfect but it works for now.

Here's a few issues we've encountered:
The IR Toy inter-pulse measurement can be up to 1.7 seconds long. The end of data flag for the IR Toy (0xffff) comes 1.7 seconds after the last IR activity. As it is now, EventGhost doesn't try to decode the signal until the end of data flag.

RC5 toggle bits are not decoded correctly, maybe related to above issue.

The IR Toy also has a transmit mode, which we'll support in a future update.

[Livin]

thx for posting about this... I did not know about the device. I will keep this in my back pocket in case I need one in the future.