Recommended XBMCLive hardware (true IR On/Off)
#1
1st a shout out to all the experts here: Thanks a million for this great free system, group effort and all your assistance!

Now one question: What is the best/recommended & CHEAP hardware to run XBMC (Linux) on, that has a real IR remote control (not some USB add-on) and can be powered on/off even if Linux or XBMC crashes?

I got the Revo R1600 and it is great (especially at the $200 price-point) and even with 1GB RAM it seems to work great with the 185.18.36 drivers that fix the LPCM bitstreaming issues of 190.53 that ships with XBMCLive 9.11 Camelot.

My problem is the remote control, I got an MCE compatible remote (see HERE) and it is OK for most part, however power On/Off does not work right due to the IR sensor being USB and thus not a true hardware tie-in to 5v or 3v standby power. Plus sleep does not work (I did follow the tutorial HERE), since as soon as I try to sleep it in XBMC it wakes up probably due to background IR radiation.

Does anyone know of a real IR controlled box similar to the Revo R1600 and with the ION chip?

Thanks!
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#2
You should be able to set your USB ports to be powered by +5VSB either in the BIOS or with a jumper on the MOBO. Power is only half of the equation though and being USB or not as absolutely nothing to do with anything. The device would have to be capable of 1) decoding the IR commands itself, 2) recognizing a "power toggle" command and 3) trip the power switch pin on the motherboard.

Many USB devices do 1 already, acting as a normal keyboard. Finding something that actually does 2 and 3 in consumer grade package should be near impossible. I wouldn't even bother looking for a barebones or complete system with this feature. Odds are slim you'll find one. Stuff of this caliber is generally special purpose embedded systems that you won't be running XBMC on.

You best bet would be to find a DIY project that does these things and integrate it into your system. I'm sure you'll find dozens with a little time on google.
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#3
Thanks althekiller,

The XERC 2 seems the most promising true IR MOD I could find and incidentally it is for the xbox :-)

While my soldering skills are pretty good, the problem I have is that I do not know how to connect it properly inside an Acer Revo R1600 (or the new EeeBox PC EB1501) for example....
If anyone can figure that, then we are all in business!
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#4
See post #4 of the following thread:
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=59778

Apparently the Acer ApireRevo supports wake on USB keyboard/mouse, but XBMC needs to be set to go into standby.

I recently purchased the R3600. I loaded it with Unbuntu 9.10, also picked up a USB soundcard (DAC) for optical output to my receiver. The wake on remote is the last... well one of the last piece of the puzzle. Going to try the bios settings now.

The truly last piece is getting DTS passthrough to work... but this may be a Ubuntu limitation.

As for performance, I've been able to play x264 720p MKV from my NAS (via powerline Ethernet) with no problems. Getting a 1080p movie now to check out performance... but realistically don't expect to get 10+GB files often. Don't expect to watch much YouTube so haven't played much with flash videos.

Overall very happy.

Hope this helped. Let me know if you have any other questions.
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#5
Eh, I dunno I'd call that "true" all it does is the on/off bit. No control stuff.
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#6
Sorry, didn't realize you were looking for a true IR ON/OFF...

But I figured out how to get my box to wakeup from suspend with the remote. Figured out that the wakeup function on the USB port was disabled. Added a line to my rc.local to add the USB0 to acpi.

Works like a charm... would be nice to kill the power light on the box since it blinks while suspended.
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#7
SweetS2K Wrote:Sorry, didn't realize you were looking for a true IR ON/OFF...

But I figured out how to get my box to wakeup from suspend with the remote. Figured out that the wakeup function on the USB port was disabled. Added a line to my rc.local to add the USB0 to acpi.

Works like a charm... would be nice to kill the power light on the box since it blinks while suspended.

little piece of black tape will do the trick to get rid of that annoying light!
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#8
Thats exactly what I did with the Asrock until they updates the bios to take care of that!
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#9
ssimon Wrote:Thanks althekiller,

The XERC 2 seems the most promising true IR MOD I could find and incidentally it is for the xbox :-)

While my soldering skills are pretty good, the problem I have is that I do not know how to connect it properly inside an Acer Revo R1600 (or the new EeeBox PC EB1501) for example....
If anyone can figure that, then we are all in business!

I wrote a How-To on this very subject a couple weeks ago.Smile
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#10
I think the most recent post on the frontpage made it easy....
I think the apple TV is a very interesting option, cost wise maybe not the cheapest cause you need to add 69$ for the decoding chip, but hey its silent, small, IR capable etc.
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#11
This could be what you are looking for.. i'm sure you could easily hook this up to a revo; http://www.simerec.com/index.html
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Recommended XBMCLive hardware (true IR On/Off)0