JP1 Remotes

All the cable company DTA boxes come with IR receivers with a stereo jack. Is there any use for these in the JP1 world?

vickyg2003 wrote:All the cable company DTA boxes come with IR receivers with a stereo jack. Is there any use for these in the JP1 world?

If you didn't already own a widget and were proficient at soldering, you could whip up a poor man's version of a widget. Just need to power the IR receiver and connect the demod output to a soundcard input. Then you can record the output of a remote using any recording program. It's an awful lot of work to analyze the result since there are no tools available for demod'd IR recorded as sound files.

Since we all know that you own a widget, it's probably not worth your while, but in a pinch.....

A.A.

cauer29 wrote:Since we all know that you own a widget, it's probably not worth your while, but in a pinch.....

haha, actually I have TWO! I don't know how I'd survive without a widget.

So doing anything with these IR receivers would take soldering. Yuck. I just thought that maybe in a pinch someone could plug it in like a microphone, and analyze the timings with some musical wave viewing software like audacity.

You could try running a standard audio cable from the blaster into a PC and then try recording the input, just to see what it looks like. But even if it works and you're able to record a WAV file from the input, we don't have any software to analyse it and convert it into something useful.

vickyg2003 wrote:

cauer29 wrote:Since we all know that you own a widget, it's probably not worth your while, but in a pinch.....

haha, actually I have TWO! I don't know how I'd survive without a widget.

So doing anything with these IR receivers would take soldering. Yuck. I just thought that maybe in a pinch someone could plug it in like a microphone, and analyze the timings with some musical wave viewing software like audacity.

Generally the IR demod in these receivers needs power and I don't know of any way to get power to one and also get the output to a soundcard input to do the recording, without doing any soldering. Maybe a 3.5mm stereo plug to 2 RCA jack convertor cable. Then you'd have to do an RCA back to mono 3.5mm plug for the soundcard end and RCA to something or other that would power the IR demod IC. This would all be assuming that the original stereo jack was wired with gnd on the inner-most ring.

If you could manage that, then you could use Audacity to record IR signals in demodulated form. You couldn't figure out the frequency, but as you well know, that's not nearly as important as the burst durations. It would be an entirely manual operation to interpret the signals from the recorded waveform. I suppose it could be a small software project to convert a wave file to something compatible with the existing JP1 tools. Seems like a lot of work if you already own 2 widgets.

A.A.

Well plugging the ir recievier's stereo plug into the microphone jack and trying to record from the microphone just caused the recording software to crash.

You can use the jack for anything which has an IR blaster, preferably a blaster with a 3.5mm plug.

A fellow called Gary Gray, over at Tivocommunity.com forums, has developed an adapter cable, so that a Series 1 or 2 TiVo can directly control a DTA, with no IR blasters.