IRMan serial infrared receiver in Fedora 18

Fedora 18 broke my IRMan serial infrared receiver. It no longer seems to use the configuration defined in /etc/sysconfig/lirc.

Instead, you apparently need to specify the configuration directly in the daemon script /usr/lib/systemd/system/lirc.service:

So I set the correct driver and device parameters in that script:
ExecStart=/usr/sbin/lircd –driver=irman –device=/dev/ttyS0

Also, I found that Fedora 18 no longer automatically started the lirc service after the upgrade. So you need to enable it:
systemctl enable lirc

This should work after a reboot…

If it doesn’t you can try to kill all lircd instances and run:
/usr/sbin/lircd –driver=irman –device=/dev/ttyS0

followed by:
irw

This should produce output whenever you press a button on your remote.

Setting up your remote control for MythTV

The remote control receiver I use for my MythTV setup is a 10-15 year old IR-receiver called IRMan, which attaches to the COM-port. The software I use with the receiver is lirc.

You probably want to mainly follow the instructions here. But I’ll list a few pointers here nevertheless, in case you have any issues with the instructions on that page.

• Make sure you have lirc installed
• Make sure lircd is not running (in Fedora type service lirc stop)
• You need to create a configuration file /etc/lirc/lircd.conf that maps all the keys of your remote control, you can do this with the following command:

irrecord --driver=irman --device=/dev/ttyS0 /etc/lirc/lircd

Using your Logitech Harmony remote control with MythTV

I use the Logitech Harmony One with MythTV. Before that, I used the Logitech Harmony 525 for a few years.

The tricky part with setting up a Logitech remote for MythTV is that both the remote and the receiver are programmable! This means that there’s no default remote control keycodes that you can follow.

So basically, you’ll have to select an arbitrary device profile for your Logitech remote and hope that as many buttons as possible are mapped on that device profile. If some buttons are not mapped to a remote control keycode, it means that you can’t use those buttons! This is really stupidly done by Logitech, I e-mailed them asking if there is some device profile that you can use when dealing with programmable infrared receivers, but the helpdesk didn’t have ANY clue what I was talking about. You may not either, unless you have been there :)

I’ve found WINTV-PVR-350 to be the best Logitech device profile because it provides a relatively big number of key mappings. It would be so easy for Logitech to just provider a device profile with all possible buttons mapped to some keycode. Please let me know if you’ve found a better device profile!

UPDATE: After a second attempt to explain my issue to Logitech’s helpdesk, I finally got through enough lines of support to get to someone that understood my problem. They’ve now added 45 additional button mappings to my WINTV-PVR-350 profile! So now I should be able to have as many buttons mapped as I like.