Re: USB Receiver Advice?

On Sun, 22 Oct 2017 at 19:54 Bengt Martensson <[email protected]>
wrote:

> On 10/22/17 15:20, Paul Gration wrote:
> > This was the thinking that led me to work on a web UI to manage, control
> > and stream output of LIRC programs back in 2013/14 as part of a project
> > for a course I was studying at the time. Demo is here:
> >
> > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbUA6lHOAEw
>
> First of all, why a Web thingy when you need to connect your hardware to
> the client anyhow? Web applications are there for not having to install
> anything, but here you need hardware, that needs drivers, possibly even
> kernel drivers... contradiction?? Installing hardware is "in general"
> much more of hassle than a "normal" program.
>
> Secondly (of course I am biased here), I think it looks very pale in
> comparison with IrScrutinizer. It has all the problems and quirks of
> irrecord. The initial learning phase ("Please keep pressing...  ") is an
> annoyance (not needed by IrScrutinizer). The application does not
> identify the signal, nor does it measure frequency. It forces an
> unnatural linear work procedure upon the user (type name, press button,
> click mouse, ... -- advantageous if you have a large number > 2 of
> hands; difficult or impossible to back up to fix mistakes).  Etc.


I see your point and agree with your comments on IrScrutinizer, I've got it
installed but haven't used it much yet but it certainly looks like an
improvement on irrecord.
I'm not sure what you meant by connecting hardware to the client, so to
expand on what it did a little further.. The set up I had was an RPi with
an IR receiver and transmitters attached for different hardware I wanted to
control (TV, BluRay, etc). The software in the video ran on the RPi and
exposed the web interface to the local network - so in this scenario I'd
consider the RPi (with hardware attached) the server.
From there I could connect via a browser from any device and start
instances of lircd, irrecord, irw, irsend or any of the other programs so
that I could record new remotes or transmit IR signals to the TV or BluRay
player instead of needing to SSH to a command line on the RPi and start the
programs that way.
It had the same problems and quirks of irrecord because what you were
seeing *was* irrecord.. the software simply spawned the processes on the
RPi and provided the raw output and an input via various web forms (reading
stdout/stderr streams and pushing the data out through websockets to any
connected client browser). The intention wasn't to fix the shortcomings of
irrecord or anything like that, it was just to make the LIRC programs more
accessible for mobile devices and was a fun thing to experiment and learn
about as a project for my studies at the time.

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