Hi folks,

I always said that I wouldn't do it, but after having the right idea how  
it might work very easily Thursday, I decided that it might be worth  
putting one day of work in this. The greatest part of the work was  
reorganisation of lircd's code I anyway wanted to do some day. I had the  
code for the Tekram dongle already lying around. So you will find the  
outcome at http://fsinfo.cs.uni-sb.de/~columbus/lirc/software/snapshots/ 
lirc-0.5.5-tekram.tar.gz.

This package will do the following (and *only* the following):
Send IR commands to consumer devices. I am able to control my Technisat  
satellite receiver and my Sony CD player.
It will *not* support receiving of IR signals. irrecord won't work.

You will need the following:
Tekram IrMate 210B connected to a serial port.
A config file for the device you want to control. Some are available at  
the LIRC homepage.
I've tested this with linux-2.2.10. 2.0.x kernels migth not work because  
tcdrain() does not seem to be implemented (or it's just me overlooking  
something).

To install do the following:
Get lirc-0.5.5-tekram and xrc-0.5.1.
Install xrc-0.5.1, you only really need rc, but having xrc was very  
helpful for debugging.
in the lirc-0.5.5-tekram directory enter:
./setup.sh
It doesn't matter which driver you select there, it will be ignored  
anyway.
Run configure and compile the package with make.
Create a link at /dev/tekram to the serial port you want to use, e.g.
/dev/ttyS0.
Run the lirc daemon: ./lircd "your-config-file"

If you now run xrc or rc and try to control something, it *might* even  
work or simply nothing will happen...

While it's working for me I won't make this part of official LIRC releases  
until I hear a *lot* of success stories. The range is >2m pointing  
directly at the device. My Sony CD player seems to expect any command at  
least twice, so it might not work at first try. Use rc's macro capability  
to work-around this. You also might need to play around with signal  
lengths. The config file for the RM-D335 did work but the config file for  
the RM-D991 did not although they only slightly differ in signal lengths.

I don't have any IrDA support in my kernel, so I don't know if you will  
have to disable it first, I guess you will have to. The driver for the  
Tekram dongle is user space only.

Good luck.

Christoph

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