[chongwho]

I'm having similar problems with my new i5 Haswell NUC.

The MCE Keyboard keys (C, M, I, esc, backspace etc) are not working at all.

But the MCE Remote buttons are working.

Any help would be much appreciated.

[DavidHorton]

Chongwho,

I've just got my new i5 NUC (running Fedora 20) working successfully with my Harmony 650.

These are the steps I needed. It took a little while to figure out exactly what combination would achieve the desired effect.

• Enable the IR receiver in Fedora (http://intelnuc.blogspot.com.au/2014/01/...swell.html). ACPI issues cause it not to be enabled by default. Linux specific.
  
• Configure keymap within XBMC to add additional key mappings (I have the Harmony set up as a MCE Keyboard and needed to add some additional key mappings as per post #2 here - http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=95063)
  
• Set up Harmony remote as a Microsoft MCE Keyboard. I created an activity XBMC containing 2 devices, my TV and the Microsoft MCE Keyboard and then customised the remote buttons to correspond to the appropriate actions as per the mappings (from link in previous bullet).
  

You shouldn't need to use lirc.

The only issue I seem to have is that occasionally the remote sends multiple key presses for a single button press. I've set the repeat count to zero in the Harmony configuration but this doesn't seem to have got rid of it completely. I can live with that though.

If you also want to send other commands/key combinations not in the MCE Keyboard profile then you can add an additional device to the activity (e.g. in some threads people have wanted to use the Microsoft Media Centre SE profile as this allows sending of Win+X combinations) and then assign the appropriate command to the relevant button.

Hope this helps

[heveys4]

Hi guys.

I have just setup my harmony 1000 and all the controls are working the way I want them to.

My big problem is every time i start the activity it starts xbmc then crashes and gives me error: Unable to create GUI, Exiting

once i hit enter i can then relaunch xbmc and everything works fine but everytime it starts its crashes. And only when using the activity to start it.

Im guessing its something todo with the impute setting for xbmc but iv seems to try everything and its only causes problems even locks up my computer some time.

any help would be great.

thanks soo much

[awarras]

Hey guys, I followed your instructions, I am having one small problem with Logitech Ultimate...
I have mapped all my buttons under both activity and devices, the buttons mapped under SE click correctly, other buttons such as C I ESC Backspace and all other ones that are not available under SE's menu and are available as MCE Keyboard don't click right, one click one the button will send out multiple commands to the XBMC did anyone have this problem? How did you fix it?

I'm using HP IR Receiver, Logitech Harmony XBMC 12.3, Windows 8
I also tried to play around with delay and repeat with no effect or whatsoever...

I just need the MCE Keyboard to click once or send 1 command that's all i'm asking for... Confused

[Ibanezq]

Hi everyone!
I have a Logitech Harmony 900 and I trying to setup a MCE Keyboard profile with XBMC but my IR receiver not responding for typical keyboard commands e.g. letters.
The MCE Remote profile of LH works properly - all commands working fine.

Do I need a special driver for IR receiver or software to emulate keyboard commands...?
I'm using Windows 7 x64 and XBMC 13.

Thanks for support.

[zammer]

Hi All,

I am new to XBMC world and trying to set it up first time, I have got XBMC installed on Win7 and planning to get IR reciever for it.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/New-Original-Len...4ab1575928

Would this receiver work in my case?

Thanks

[TRaSH]

not sure,
but i can tell you the hp recievr works
http://www.ebay.com/itm/New-HP-USB-MCE-I...3ccc62ed6b

[wints]

The MCE Keyboard keys (C, M, I, esc, backspace etc) are not working at all.

But the MCE Remote buttons are working.

Any help would be much appreciated.

I,m having similar problems to this myself with harmony one remote, bought a ORtek VRC-1100 and it works but had to set it up as a ORtek and not a MCE Remote and all works fine but then added the MCE Keyboard and tried to map some of the keys (C, M, I, esc, backspace etc) but they do nothing at all any ideas would be most appreciated thanks

[Floyd]

Hello,

I have recently bought an Harmony Smart Control, I thought I can directly control my PC but after reading the web, I saw that it's not possible. Options to do it seems to use IR or Bluetooth. In any cases persons expect somes issues. With an IR RC6 USB receiver and MCE Keyboard as Harmony device there are some trouble with keys as prevously post deal with, I don't have an RC6 receiver so I didn't test it, but I sure this solution was completed tested. So I'm developping an alternative.

My solution use an IR receiver with an Arduino Uno and a custom .NET program. You can select any IR device in Harmony to control your PC. With my program you can assign an instruction for each received IR code. For exemple, send a key to the focused application, shutdown computer, start a program, etc. Instead of sending key to XBMC, I'm thinking to use the XBMC API to control it.

This work is in progress but I will post here soon the Arduino schema and the source code of the application.

Keep in touch

[burbreadys]

Hi everyone

I have a Thermaltake Mozart Sx Slim case, with a logiteech dinovo mini and a Harmony 625

I use windows 7 with XBMC 13.1, and I want to make a command to order my harmony to change subtitles and audio language with any key of the remote control

I just made with the dinovo mini, but I can't do with harmony control

Can anyone help me??

Thankssss

[igordost]

Hello Everyone,

I read the entire story about Harmony One inter-key delay issue (max 300ms due to chipset limitation). Thank you all for great help

My question is: apart of old Logitech universal remotes (5xx, 6xx etc) do you know which new Harmony models are free of this "300ms feature"?

Kind regards
Igor

[gojkoo]

Hi all,

I've spent a long time trying to get this combination to work: Harmony 555 and HP MCE IR receiver OVU400102/71, under Windows 7. The remote works well for TV and other IR devices I have (amplifier, CD,..). But together with the HP IR receiver I get nothing on the screen. The receiver is identified in the Device Manager as eHome Infrared Receiver (USBCIR). The red light blinks on the HP IR when I press a button on Harmony. According to HP the proper identification in the device manager and the blinking red light indicate a working IR receiver.

I followed this thread as well as the spin-off one that was supposed to be the official guide but died off eventually. Apparently the combination works for many with a few quirks here and there but I get literally no response on the screen. I added MCE Keyboard and Media Center SE devices, created activities as per guide. I open notepad but nothing gets typed when I press keys on the remote that correspond to specific letters. I also tried the MCE remote device but get no remote activity both in Windows media center and XBMC.

In general, this is no a XBMC question, although XBMC is the reason for the whole action. Can anyone help me how to make the Harmony555 plus HP IR receiver working in Windows 7? How can I test if the selected devices in the Harmony setup work properly? Thanks a bunch.

[bodhi]

Hi all,

I've spent a long time trying to get this combination to work: Harmony 555 and HP MCE IR receiver OVU400102/71, under Windows 7. The remote works well for TV and other IR devices I have (amplifier, CD,..). But together with the HP IR receiver I get nothing on the screen. The receiver is identified in the Device Manager as eHome Infrared Receiver (USBCIR). The red light blinks on the HP IR when I press a button on Harmony. According to HP the proper identification in the device manager and the blinking red light indicate a working IR receiver.

I followed this thread as well as the spin-off one that was supposed to be the official guide but died off eventually. Apparently the combination works for many with a few quirks here and there but I get literally no response on the screen. I added MCE Keyboard and Media Center SE devices, created activities as per guide. I open notepad but nothing gets typed when I press keys on the remote that correspond to specific letters. I also tried the MCE remote device but get no remote activity both in Windows media center and XBMC.

In general, this is no a XBMC question, although XBMC is the reason for the whole action. Can anyone help me how to make the Harmony555 plus HP IR receiver working in Windows 7? How can I test if the selected devices in the Harmony setup work properly? Thanks a bunch.

It's been so long ago, but I do remember some XMBC dev (Jim, I forgot his real handle I might be able to find it in my bookmarks) has a tool that you can run in XBMC and it will show the code of the keys pressed if it received them successfully.

I can't recall whether the debug log will show anything, it might. Your 555 must be in the same series as the 550?

Update:
Found it, turn on debug log to see the keys pressed: http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Usi...in_Windows (troubleshooting section).

[DavidHorton]

Chongwho,

I've just got my new i5 NUC (running Fedora 20) working successfully with my Harmony 650.

These are the steps I needed. It took a little while to figure out exactly what combination would achieve the desired effect.

• Enable the IR receiver in Fedora (http://intelnuc.blogspot.com.au/2014/01/...swell.html). ACPI issues cause it not to be enabled by default. Linux specific.
  
• Configure keymap within XBMC to add additional key mappings (I have the Harmony set up as a MCE Keyboard and needed to add some additional key mappings as per post #2 here - http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=95063)
  
• Set up Harmony remote as a Microsoft MCE Keyboard. I created an activity XBMC containing 2 devices, my TV and the Microsoft MCE Keyboard and then customised the remote buttons to correspond to the appropriate actions as per the mappings (from link in previous bullet).
  

You shouldn't need to use lirc.

The only issue I seem to have is that occasionally the remote sends multiple key presses for a single button press. I've set the repeat count to zero in the Harmony configuration but this doesn't seem to have got rid of it completely. I can live with that though.

If you also want to send other commands/key combinations not in the MCE Keyboard profile then you can add an additional device to the activity (e.g. in some threads people have wanted to use the Microsoft Media Centre SE profile as this allows sending of Win+X combinations) and then assign the appropriate command to the relevant button.

Hope this helps

It's been quite a while since I posted the above and I thought I'd give an update as I finally seem to have a set up which I'm happy with. I gradually got more and more frustrated with the remote in XBMC sending multiple (hundreds) of key presses and almost getting stuck in an infinite loop so I wanted to find a more reliable alternative. So, I'm going to describe my current setup, which may or may not help you depending on how similar yours is...

Issues...

• MCE Keyboard profile seems to be unreliable with Harmony remotes (my Harmony 650 at least and I've read that others seem to suffer too). The issue is that often (at least 1 in every 10 button presses) it gets stuck in a loop sending endless key presses for the most recently pressed button. I could live with it to start but it got more and more annoying.
  
• MCE Remote profile didn't seem to suffer the same issue. However, previously I couldn't get this working fully either and it didn't have the full set of keys I wanted.
  
• As far as I can tell, there are bugs in the Harmony profiles themselves. For some buttons I assigned, I couldn't detect scancodes being generated by the driver in Linux. I could detect pulses (using mode2) but these weren't converted into scancodes.
  

Current Set Up...

• Hardware/OS as per quoted post
  
• Harmony activity (XBMC) contains the TV plus two XBMC remote devices. The profiles I've used are 'MCE Remote' and 'Media Center Extender'. I've used both to get the full set of buttons I wanted. Assigned functions to the appropraite buttons (mainly from MCE Remote profile with the gaps filled in from MCExtender)
  
• I no longer use the MCE Keyboard profile at all
  
• I've also removed my customisations to the keymap in keyboard.xml
  
• udev rule to create a persistent input device name for my receiver (it's inbuilt to the NUC so probably would be a static /dev/input/eventX device but you never know so lets make a static synonym and use that)
  
• Setup the Lirc service to run automatically via systemd. Configured Lirc to use the device name from the udev rule and the devinput driver. I didn't need to change any of the key mappings in lircd.conf (I just took the standard file for devinput devices - i.e. events coming from the kernel devinput driver)
  
• With Lirc disabled, check scancodes are received using ir-keytable -t
  
• With Lirc service running, check buttons are mapped correctly using irw
  
• In XBMC, turn on debug logging and grep for "OnKey" in the log file (~/.xbmc/temp/xbmc.log). Check the correct key is received for each button.
  
• If I disable Lirc, XBMC still responds to some buttons but not all, so I use Lirc. With Lirc disabled, the events come through to XBMC as keyboard events and so the default keyboard keymap is used (keyboard.xml). The default mappings here are for keyboards so do not contain mappings for the 'special' keys sent by a remote profile ('DVD_MENU' and such like). Rather than remap all the keys, I choose just to let Lirc present them as a remote and map them via the default Lircmap.xml
  

What I learned through this process...

• The MCE Keyboard emulates a keyboard - Doh! Really! This means it doesn't go through the remote control driver path in the kernel and so Lirc is not used. Using the MCE keyboard profile on the Harmony, ir-keytable -t shows no scancodes for any button presses. Hardly surprising when you think about it.
  
• The MCE Remote/MCExtender profiles do go through the remote driver path, so Lirc can be used if desired.
  
• xbmc's keyboard.xml file is only used for commands coming via a keyboard (real or emulated). So it's not used if a rcX device or Lirc delivers the commands. In this case it is the remote.xml file that governs the commands (and Lircmap.xml if using Lirc)
  

[gojkoo]

It's been so long ago, but I do remember some XMBC dev (Jim, I forgot his real handle I might be able to find it in my bookmarks) has a tool that you can run in XBMC and it will show the code of the keys pressed if it received them successfully.

I can't recall whether the debug log will show anything, it might. Your 555 must be in the same series as the 550?

Update:
Found it, turn on debug log to see the keys pressed: http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Usi...in_Windows (troubleshooting section).

Thanks for this. In the meantime I found out that there is an XBMC profile in the harmony DB. It is under media PC/microsoft. It works to a degree. A number of commands are not recognized. I will check the link you left and hope to get the full functionality.