LIRC: linux infrared remote control

LIRC

Intro

This is about how to use an arbitrary infrared remote control (like for your TV) to control your own program running under Linux.

The end result will be that LIRC will receive signals from your remote and translate them to keypresses, and your program can connect to LIRC and get these keypresses as they happen, then do whatever it wants with them.

Difficulties

One problem I ran into getting started with most of the howtos and tutorials I found on the web was that almost anything not quite right in your configuration resulted in things not working with no indication of what the problem was. That is, you could press buttons on the remote all day and there was no indication that the PC was seeing any of it.

Why is this so hard

Here’s what I think is going on, based on how these things seem to need to be configured etc.

Sending data via infra-red is messy. An infra-red receiver attached to your computer just continuously measures and reports the level of infra-red frequency light hitting it.

Then something we’ll call a decoder program - e.g. LIRC - has to monitor that continuous stream of light levels and try to spot it when extra infra-red from a remote is hitting it, by the pattern of changes to the levels.

There’s no standard on how IR remotes encode data into IR. So the only reasonable way to make this work is to tell the decoder what remote or remotes we’re expecting to see commands from, so it can try to match up what it’s seeing to commands from those specific remotes. Otherwise there are just too many possibilities to watch for them all.

The unfortunate consequence of this is that if we haven’t told it the right remote, it just won’t see any IR commands at all.

Luckily, there are some very smart people who have built tools that can look at input from a remote for a while and try to guess what remote it is, and we might have to resort to using them. But it’s much easier to use a configuration someone else has already worked out for us, so we’ll try that first.

How to tell if it’s working

We need an easy way to tell if LIRC is seeing and correctly interpreting our remote commands. We’ll use the irw tool.

Run irw /var/run/lirc/lircd, then start pressing buttons on the remote. If things are working, it should print out codes and key names. If not, you probably won’t see anything.

When done, hit Control-C to stop irw.

The easy start

So, I’ll start with the approach most often documented, that if it works, is simple. But if this doesn’t work, don’t waste a lot of time fiddling with it. Move on to the next section.

This approach will only work if LIRC has a configuration file for your remote - and you know which one it is.

  1. Install LIRC. On Ubuntu, sudo apt install lirc should do it.

  2. During the install, Ubuntu will prompt you to pick your remote so that it can configure LIRC for you. Feel free to try this.

  3. If LIRC is already installed, or you want to try a different configuration, you can re-run the install-time configuration using sudo dpkg-reconfigure lirc.

  4. Check if things are working as described above. If they are, you can skip down to the section on using LIRC input from a program. If not, you can try configurations for other remotes that seem likely.

If the easy approach doesn’t work