RM-900 sounblaster remote control

[uglyman]

hey everybody,
it has been a while. my gentoo box has been running smoothly. No big problems. I set up ALSA a while back and overall have been very happy with it (once I got it working anyway). Now I have decided to see if I can get the remote control working with my Soundblaster platinum 5.1 blah blah sound card. it is basically an emu10k1 with a thing that goes in a drive bay that has a few jacks for headphones etc. it also has an infared port.

I have run across a couple of projects that are related to making this work:

there is IControl
which according to them only works with the Creative emu10k1 drivers
it also doesn't support running external programs (i.e. shell scripts) which is what I was really interested in. It has builtin stuff you can make it do to your window manager xmms etc.

there is also rcenter
This seems better suited to me because you can run any arbitrary script or whatever you want (perfect for my use) and it says that it reads from /dev/midi00 where the ir commands should show up. The catch is that it only works with the kernel emu10k1 drivers.

I have a /dev/midi00 but it doesn't seem to be doing anything. I was hoping maybe there was a way to get rcenter working with alsa if only alsa could send the ir stuff to /dev/midi00. The alsa docs (/usr/share/doc/) in the INSTALL doc mention an option to enable ir support in the emu10k1 module with enable_ir. I tried goofing with this option and modprobe for a while but still don't get anything to /dev/midi00.

I was always under the impression that there was no way to run say the kernel drivers for this card and alsa at the same time... but I don't know this for absolute sure..

my questions (after this long boring story) are these:

1. Is there a way to get this done with ALSA either with one of these two projects or another way? and/or is there a way to get the alsa module to send the ir signals somewhere in /dev? I am a beginner programmer but could maybe come up with my own program to read from /dev and call some shell scripts if I had to. Especially since I could look at rcenter code to get me going.

2. Is there a way to say turn on the ir support of the kernel driver and have it work nicely with alsa? I am guessing no.

3. Should I just switch to the creative drivers? I have heard good things but I have liked alsa. icontrol still won't do what I want but I could maybe hack something together if the source is available. also the authors website lists the feature I want in his todo list. The kernel drivers are not a good solution because they didn't work with several games etc.

I may just be missing a simple thing with alsa that would get the messages to /dev/midi00, I hope so. anyway thanks for any help and for reading this far! if I come up with a good solution I will post it to help others. Perhaps if rcenter works I could look into writing an ebuild for it.

thanks
uglyman

[hrnick]

If you want your remote control to work you should head over to www.lirc.org and take a look under supported remote controls. If you can find your remote there you can emerge lirc and set up /etc/lircd and ~/.lircrc according to the documentation at http://www.lirc.org/html/index.html.

Just tell me if you encounter any problems and I'll try to help...

[uglyman]

Hey just, wanted to say thanks for the reply, it appears that I will need to build a reciever (I don't find any mention of my ir reciever). It seems they only support stuff on TV cards. This is on my sound card. I can throw that reciever together this week and see if I can get it all working. I think I even already have the ir reciever ic in my toolbox. There seems to be a problem with the ebuild and gcc 3.2 right now but it appears that I can build it from the source anyway. In any event thanks a lot because I didn't know about Lirc at all! I will post back here if it works.

later
uglyman

[hrnick]

I just came across a project that 'Reads events from the Creative RM900 remote control (bundled with the Creative LiveDrive) and runs scripts'. It can be found at http://rooster.stanford.edu/~ben/projects/rcenter.php

[uglyman]

I am not sure how I confused this.

I had already seen the rcenter page you mentioned. Actually it is one of the ones I talked about in my original post. I said it only worked with the kernel driver which is wrong. Actually it works with the Creative open source drivers. Maybe this means that I switched the two and IControl (the other project I mentioned) works with the kernel driver. I don't know. In any event the main problem is that I have been using ALSA and niether project works with that. Apparently the ALSA driver has absolutely no IR support (according to the ALSA/SUSE website) I am debating if it is a good idea to try to switch away from ALSA because so far it is working with everything and it has always been a use flag since I started this install.

The one advantage I see to lirc is the mouse control (although this could probably be set up with rcenter too).

perhaps I should just bite the bullet, set USE=-alsa and remerge everything plus the creative open source drivers and hope for the best.

I am trying to research now how successful people have been with the creative drivers. If I can't find something to convince me they are better then I may still just build a new lirc reciever.

thanks for the help,

uglyman

[hrnick]

[uglyman]

You may be right. I quit my job testing at Mackie Designs inc (the audio equipment manufacturing co) last month so I could go back to school. Maybe I am just looking for an excuse to dust off the old soldering iron!

Thanks again for the help, I will post my results here soon.

later,
Kelly

PS by the way part of what is taking me so long is the fact that I saw the tie fighter model with the reciever builtin over at www.lirc.org and I am trying to decide what kind of toy to build it into. I was thinking maybe I could build it as a new gun for my jhonny Rico Starship Troopers action figure. That would look good on my monitor. maybe a new weapon for an old TMNT Donatello action figure (he was always the one inventing gadgets). I may pick up a seial card before I fry my muthaboard too. Or maybe a lego castle.... decisions decisions.

[hrnick]

wow, I'd missed that tie fighter project, now I just have to look for something to build my reciever into...