I have two Dish 311 receivers. Rather than deal with an IR blaster that either requires an ugly LED attached to the two units, or a blaster that is subject to interference, I made a really cheap (about $15) hardware modification that allows me to make a hardwired connection directly from the 311's board to a small interface board that sits inside my HTPC. The interface board is connected to a serial header on the PC's motherboard.
This hack involves a handful of components, as well as opening the Dish receiver and breaking one IR receiver lead. When the Dish->PC cable is plugged-into the back of the Dish receiver, the regular remote is disabled; when it is unplugged, the receiver operates with the remote.
I have only tried it on a Dish 311, but there's really no reason this same circuit shouldn't work with other IR-based equipment that lacks a real, hardwired interface. If there's enough interest, I'll do a writeup and post the URL here.
I would be interested. Please let me know where I could find the instructions. Good timing, I was just thinking about something like this within the last month. I have one Dish receiver and will be adding another one soon and did not want to hack my ir blaster to be able to send two ir remote address or have interferrence between the two units with one ir blaster.
- James _______________________________________________ mythtv-users mailing list [email protected] http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
