JP1 Remotes

I looked over some notes I had and I did work on the FT232R in Bit-Bang mode(synchronous and asynchronous) with the CBUS lines with a proto board Tommy came up with.

According to a quick glance at my notes, I did get some of it working but couldn't get the I2C quite right.

binky123 wrote:I looked over some notes I had and I did work on the FT232R in Bit-Bang mode(synchronous and asynchronous) with the CBUS lines with a proto board Tommy came up with.

According to a quick glance at my notes, I did get some of it working but couldn't get the I2C quite right.

I wasn't able to locate this effort of making a USB<->I2C adapter, specially the JP softwares would need to support such a mode (do they have such a mode?)

The main issue here seems to be that chipsets other than FTDI do not handle signals except TxRx properly - and that is required for JP softwares to initialize the controller in the remote.

It would not be too difficult to have a microcontroller send these sequences to the remote at the beginning and "handoff" the communications to the USB port - but this would require changing the softwares.

There where horrible bugs in bit-bang mode on the R series chips. The new X series is much better, but still not perfect.

IIC, SPI and similar are usually not a problem as long as exact timing is not required.

I tried IR capture with bit-bang mode about 6 or 7 years ago and it was not usable.

........

carsonlittle wrote: That's exactly what I want to do - use one of the 16 bit timers on the PIC18F, but servicing the data output at a sample rate of 100 uS when using the USB firmware might pose challenges (aka, "I never did this before at this rate").

However, the pic18f2550, does have a 256 bytes Data EEPROM, and 2K RAM - this should be enough to buffer the counts at a relaxed data output rate.

Yes, it is a challenge to do perfect non-stop 100 us interval and also handle USB. Buffer is not a practical solution - the IR Widget is supposed to be non-stop unlimited length capture. That is one of it's unique features.

carsonlittle wrote: Did your "all-in-one" widget use just the FDTI or FDTI+PIC (like the USB IRWidget)?

FT232RL and PIC18F24J11

Firmware written in assembly. Much of it reused for the JP1 EEPROM adapter.

Kevin Timmerman wrote: Yes, it is a challenge to do perfect non-stop 100 us interval and also handle USB. Buffer is not a practical solution - the IR Widget is supposed to be non-stop unlimited length capture. That is one of it's unique features.

True, but I don't see why buffering would be a problem if the software knows how to handle the data.

Kevin Timmerman wrote:There where horrible bugs in bit-bang mode on the R series chips. The new X series is much better, but still not perfect.

IIC, SPI and similar are usually not a problem as long as exact timing is not required.

I tried IR capture with bit-bang mode about 6 or 7 years ago and it was not usable.

I can only assume that custom software was written to make the FTDI cable work in bit-bang mode with the JP1x remotes (unless you were talking about the I2C protocol that only JP1 remotes use to program the external rom).

Could you have a look at http://www.hifi-remote.com/forums/viewt ... 190#107190

Kevin Timmerman wrote: There are several solutions to the RTS problem. I have a JP1 interface and IR Widget combo working on 18F2550 and 18F13K50. Not ready for release yet - have some cleanup to do.

I just noticed this jewel - needless to say, I would be much obliged if you could share it.

Whatever TODOs you have, shoot me an email and I will try my best.

The Robman wrote:I don't know what the status is regarding parallel (LPT) or serial cables with 64-bit systems.

Just reading the beginners forum and a topic "64bit windows 7 with LPT1 cable". Version IR804 works like a charm in Win7_64bit OS. I use to have to run IR on a Win7_32b with some tweaking to get it to work. Now, with IR804, install the driver, launch IR804, go to lpt port and select other and put in the value of the port from Hardware Manager.
ie...my lpt1 was using resources AD00-AD07.
entry for IR was AD00.