I am running xbmc on a raspberry pi and it connects to the internet through a laptop using a crossover cable (the laptop is connected to a wirless router). Is there a way to use the android remote app to control the media center using this setup ? (the remote works fine when i connect the pi straight to the router)
Thanks in advance
I'm going to make a guess that it's a routing issue on the laptop. The pi is hooked up on the wired adapter (say lan0) and the laptop is hooked up to the household router via wireless (say the wlan0 port). So the laptop has to act as a router to send packets between wlan0 and lan0. The android connects via wireless, so it's on the wlan0 side. Perhaps the laptop is directing the android port out on the wlan0 side and not routing to the lan0 port. Maybe if you had another laptop with a wireless card you could do some detective work tracing routes and such to see where the traffic is actually going.
I'm not entirely sure you need a crossover cable. See this.
http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/3760 . That might also give you some clues.
And then, of course, another solution would be to get a wireless card (< $20) for the pi and then you wouldn't have to worry about the laptop connection. Mind you, you wouldn't learn anything if you do that.
Whether on not a x-over is necessary depends on the port-sensing abilities at each end. You just have to try (unless someone has published the results of that particular combination).
That the problem is routing seems a fair bet to me - should the laptop be running linux, then it would be possible to use it to detect the problem, I think