I finally gave up on an IR Blaster. I tinkered with the gap various times and never found a value that was rock solid with Dish Network receivers. If I had a remote receiver that would see the 56k pulses It might help, in that I could get the value of gap that way, which may or may be enough help.
>From what I can tell there are two problems with generic IR blasters. 1) The faster modulation frequency required makes it that much harder to be consistently right and not mess up any channel changes. 2) Kernels these days hapilly multithread, and it is so easy for another process to delay things and mess up the timing. Maybe if the entire blaster code was in the kernel, it might be able to remain solid regardless. I'm not sure if a kernel scheduler is available to insure the precision needed to gaurantee this. Even if it was, it would probably be a lot of work to figure it out, and would probably take a decent chunk of resources just for that task. What is needed almost is to find an external interface that runs at 56kHz. I can't see how using the data lines on a serial port can work cleanly since you have the start and stop bits.. Something like one of national instruments digital I/O boards would likely be simple enough to program to do it, but then it is cheaper to buy the my blaster. Similarly you could develop something similar to the myblaster, but then it is again easier just to buy the MyBlaster product since the time involved, for me to do it anyway, would not be trivial.. This might be something to think of if I ever get back to working on figuring out USB chips with microcontrollers.. If nothing else it would be a good learning project.. At any rate, as the title suggests, I basically gave up on getting an IR blaster to work solidly in my case with Dish Network receivers. I suppose if you dedicated a machine just to that, it might work, since there would be no large programs preempting things, but with myth doing everything else, it just seems unlikely in my case.. I'll let everyone know my experiences with the MyBlaster in a week or two, once I've had time to get it and be sure of it..
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