Remote controls for PCs are really great. With an ordinary remote for just a few bucks you can control almost everything on your PC while sitting on your couch. Well, thanks to lirc, of course. But most of them have one major design flaw: They’re infrared based, i.e. remote controls transmit data on an modulated infrared beam to your IR-receiver. Even a (think) sheet of paper can block the beam. So your remote always has to be within visual range of your receiver.

But there are some remotes out there which use a 433MHz beam instead of the short-waved IR-beam. For example this one by X10

1. lircd

Installing lirc is really no big deal

yum install lirc

It’s as simple as that!

You may want to tell Fedora to start the daemon automatically

chkconfig lirc on

1.1 lirc_driver

You have to tell lirc which receiver you are using. Change the value for LIRC_DRIVER in /etc/sysconfig/lirc to atilibusb:

[...]
# The infrared receiver (and/or transmitter) driver to be used by lircd(8),
# similar to passing "-H driver" to lircd(8).
# Run "/usr/sbin/lircd -H help" to get a listing of supported drivers.
LIRC_DRIVER="atilibusb"
[...]

1.2 lircd.conf

There a basically two ways of configuring your remote control: You can use one of the config files in /usr/share/lirc-remotes/ that come with lirc or create your own with a small program called irrecord

# /etc/init.d/lirc stop
# irrecord -H atilibusb ~/lircd.conf

The instructions are quite self-explaining. You may want to backup your original lircd.conf before replacing it with the one generated by irrecord

# mv /etc/lircd.conf /etc/lircd.conf.orig
# cp ~/lircd.conf /etc/lircd.conf
# /etc/init.d/lirc restart

If you don’t want to go through the whole process of generating you own config file, you can use the one from Christoph Langner’s Blog located here (local mirror).

You can check if your configuration is working fine with irw. You should be able to see output for every configured button on you remote

$ irw
00000014709b0000 00 world x10
00000014709b0000 01 world x10
[...]

If you get strange results or no output, you should check if you’ve set up the driver correctly and lirc is not interfering with an existing kernel module.

2. MythTV

Now that the remote is completely configured, you can start telling your applications which action to perform when a certain button is pressed. Every (lirc supporting) application scans ~/.lircrc (or a similar config file, e.g. MythTV uses ~/.mythtv/lircrc) and has some predefined functions you can use.

You may want to split the ~/.lircrc-file per application

## MythTV
include ~/.lirc/mythtv

## MediaKeys
include ~/.lirc/mediakeys
[...]

Now you can create an new folder ~/.lirc and place a seperate config-file for every application in it

$ mkdir ~/.lirc
$ touch ~/.lirc/mythtv

Don’t forget to add a new include statement in ~/.lircrc for every new file in ~/.lirc

The stucture within ~/.lirc/[appname] is quite simple. A short excerpt from my ~/.lirc/mythtv:

[...]
begin
  prog = mythtv
  button = ok
  config = Space
end
begin
  prog = mythtv
  button = up
  config = Up
end
[...]

Every button has to be surrounded by one begin– and one end-statement. You have to specify the program that listens to this configuration in the prog-statement. The values for button matches the values you configured in /etc/lirc and with the config-statement you can map every button on your remote to one of the predefined functions of you application (all functions you can use in MythTV can be found in the MythTV-Wiki).

3. Multimedia keys

Using you multimedia keys with lirc is a little more complicated. Let’s have a look at the config file ~/.lirc/mediakeys first (don’t forget to add the include-statement to ~/.lircrc !):

### MediaKeys
begin
        prog = irexec
        button = volume+
        repeat = 1
        delay = 5
        config = echo KeyStrPress XF86AudioRaiseVolume KeyStrRelease XF86AudioRaiseVolume | xmacroplay $DISPLAY
end
begin
        prog = irexec
        button = volume-
        repeat = 1
        delay = 5
        config = echo KeyStrPress XF86AudioLowerVolume KeyStrRelease XF86AudioLowerVolume | xmacroplay $DISPLAY
end
begin
        prog = irexec
        button = mute
        repeat = 0
        config = echo KeyStrPress XF86AudioMute KeyStrRelease XF86AudioMute | xmacroplay $DISPLAY
end
begin
        prog = irexec
        button = play
        config = echo KeyStrPress XF86AudioPlay KeyStrRelease XF86AudioPlay | xmacroplay $DISPLAY
end
begin
        prog = irexec
        button = pause
        config = echo KeyStrPress XF86AudioPause KeyStrRelease XF86AudioPause | xmacroplay $DISPLAY
end
begin
        prog = irexec
        button = next
        config = echo KeyStrPress XF86AudioNext KeyStrRelease XF86AudioNext | xmacroplay $DISPLAY
end
begin
        prog = irexec
        button = previous
        config = echo KeyStrPress XF86AudioPrev KeyStrRelease XF86AudioPrev | xmacroplay $DISPLAY
end

irexec is a small program that listens to incoming lirc-events and starts the program you configured within the config-statement. To emulate that a multimedia key on your keyboard is pressed you can use xmacroplay. Unfortunately there is no xmacro-rpm-package available in the Fedora-repository. But you can find one in Nathan Wood’s Pan-Galactic Memory Bank (mirrored here: i386, x86_64, source rpm).

For testing your multimedia key configuration you simply start irexec without any options:

$ irexec

You may want to start irexec automatically when you log in to your system. Adding irexec as daemon to gnome autostart is one way of doing it (of course, if you use kde this looks a little different…). Create a new file called irexec.desktop

$ touch ~/.config/autostart/irexec.desktop

with the following content:

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=irexec
Exec=/usr/bin/irexec -d
Icon=system-run
Comment=
Name[en_US]=irexec
Comment[en_US]=
X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=true

4. blacklist ati_remote

Actually you don’t need lirc to use this RF receiver from X10:

# lsusb
[...]
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 0bc7:0006 X10 Wireless Technology, Inc. Wireless Transceiver (ACPI-compliant)
[...]

There already is a native kernel module called ati_remote which can talk to the receiver. Now why am I telling you this after you went through the whole lirc configuration? Easy: It doesn’t support every key on every remote and you cannot change the keymappings manually, so lirc is definitly the more flexible choice (Christoph Langner’s Blog (german!)).
But it could be, that ati_remote comes as kernel module with you distribution as it does with Fedora 10. Every time you plugin your receiver, the kernel will automatically load the ati_remote module which heavily interferes with lirc. So if you’re facing unexpected output from irrecord (or even no output at all) you should probably unload the module:

rmmod ati_remote

To prohibit the kernel from loading the module again, you can blacklist it by adding ‘blacklist ati_remote’ to your modprobe configuration:

echo blacklist ati_remote >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist