[hogfan]

Goal

I have written this guide due to the recent difficulties I had getting my Harmony 880 remote's custom buttons working on a minimial installation of Ubuntu Jaunty Jackelope w/ XBMC 9.11 Camelot. There is a lot of good, but confusing information on the boards on this topic, so this guide is intended to be a clear, non-confusing step-by-step through the process. You should follow these steps in order to get your Harmony Remote's custom buttons working to perform XBMC functions. We will be doing this for the Harmony 880, but these instructions should apply to almost all Harmony models.

So lets dive in!

Prerequisites

- minimal install of Jaunty or Karmic (or XBMC Live installed to HDD)
- XBMC 9.11 Camelot (or newer SVN build)
- Lirc should already be installed (however, I will show you how)
- an IR receiver (not IRda) connected to to your HTPC
- a Harmony Universal Remote

Overview

In this guide we will be using the Original XBOX DVD Dongle (from the DVD Playback Kit) as our IR receiver. However, most of the following instructions will apply as long as you already have your Harmony working with basic buttons in XBMC with whatever IR receiver you have. For instructions on attaching the XBox DVD dongle to to your HTPC with a USB cable, see
HERE, or if you can't solder or just want to do it the easy way, buy one of THESE.

Make sure Lirc is Installed & Setup your lircd.conf File.

We are assuming that Lirc is already installed on your HTPC, and that you already have your basic buttons working on your Harmony remote. However, if not do the following:

On your HTPC press CTRL+ALT+F2 to bring up the terminal. (alternately you can SSH into your HTPC and perform the steps from a remote terminal session)

Type:

Code:

sudo apt-get install lirc

You will be prompted to install Lirc. Press Y and hit enter.

Ok, so now that Lirc is installed, we need to setup our lircd.conf file so that Lirc knows about our remote.

At the terminal Type:

Code:

sudo nano /etc/lirc/lircd.conf

You can now use the arrow keys to move down and enter the necessary button and remote codes for your device (or past them in).

The lircd.conf file if you are using the Xbox DVD Playback Kit should look something like this:

Code:

begin remote

    name  XboxDVDDongle
    bits           8

    begin codes

        SELECT         0x0b
        UP             0xa6
        DOWN           0xa7
        RIGHT          0xa8
        LEFT           0xa9
        INFO           0xc3
        9              0xc6
        8              0xc7
        7              0xc8
        6              0xc9
        5              0xca
        4              0xcb
        3              0xcc
        2              0xcd
        1              0xce
        0              0xcf
        DISPLAY        0xd5
        BACK           0xd8
        SKIP-          0xdd
        SKIP+          0xdf
        STOP           0xe0
        REVERSE        0xe2
        FORWARD        0xe3
        TITLE          0xe5
        PAUSE          0xe6
        PLAY           0xea
        MENU           0xf7

    end codes
end remote

Once all codes have entered, press CTRL+O and then ENTER to save the file. Then press CTRL+X to return to the terminal.

Now that our lircd.conf has been setup, lets test and see if we have basic commands working on our Harmony remote in XBMC.

Go ahead and type:

Code:

sudo reboot

Your HTPC will reboot and boot back into XBMC.