Notices

Right, if you still want to improve again the app when you are done with your bugs due to the new memory management and with your keysets loop system, I advise you to think about providing another panel to add custom keysets in pierogi. I have no idea how the files you find containing the manufacturers keysets work, but I suppose it's a standardized format. Using this kind of files found on the internet, the users could be able to manually link the keys to each button in pierogi, so that you are not forced to do it by yourself for all the new models in the future (by this way pierogi would never be obsolete ).

Thanks a lot again for your work copernicus.

I may indeed do that in the future. But hey, QtIrreco already has that feature; you don't have to wait for me to add it to Pierogi. And besides, the LIRC server (and QtIrreco is pretty much just a GUI on top of the LIRC server) was designed and built from the start to work off of config files provided by the user. Pierogi has been built in a completely different manner, incorporating keysets directly into the source code. Odds are, Pierogi will never have the kind of flexibility that an LIRC-based controller will have.

The flip side of this decision is that Pierogi can fairly easily do things like a power button search, something that the LIRC server will probably never be able to handle.

Well, actually, not really. (Warning -- long-winded discussion ahead! ) I started out grabbing LIRC config files (which have two internal formats -- those being raw IR timings, and slightly less raw IR timings ), but have since been grabbing files from the JP1 website (which generally uses files in either "KM" or "RM" formats that they've drawn up themselves, along with excel spreadsheets and simple textual lists of numbers), as well as a database of codes in the "Pronto" format (although I find those even more of a pain to decode). And, of course, there are individuals with either oscilloscopes or equivalent PC software all over the place who record the signals off of their own remotes and put them up on the net (like, say, Ken Shirriff's blog.)

I've kind of given up on supporting any of the various formats out there. The truth is, the original manufacturers start with a protocol, and then assign a number to each key on the remote. So, in Pierogi, I replicate this original protocol, and then rip the original manufacturer's numbers out of the various config file formats and store them as their original values. This has the benefit of being (a) much easier to store than how most of the formats out there do it (LIRC's raw timings can be painfully overblown), and (b), usually much easier to understand (as most manufacturers just start with the number 1 and work their way upwards key by key).

Anyway, check out the LIRC server -- it is fully supported on the N900 (it has been from the very start, I think), and provides a level of user control over IR codes that Pierogi will probably never be able to offer. Thanks!

outch, ok thanks for those informations. I didn't notice that QTirreco implemented this function...

FYI, another small Pierogi update is on its way into extras_devel. This one has a few fixes for the power search panel: Pressing any key on the panel should now pause a running automatic search (rather than getting fouled up and crashing ), thanks to Sixwheeledbeast for catching that. The Pioneer protocol has been tweaked to go faster (by avoiding unnecessary command repetitions), but sadly is still pretty slow. And an "edit keyset" button has been added to the panel as well, so that if you find an interesting keyset, you can immediately give it a label or make it a favorite.

I should note that if you hit the keys very very fast, you can still get Pierogi into an unstable state. I still need to do some work to make the UI bulletproof...

Also in this update, I've removed the experimental Triax keyset, and made a first pass at keysets for Creative and Crown.

As always, please give me a holler if you find bugs! Thanks.

Hello again, yes, time for another Pierogi update to extras_devel.

This one is a bit more involved than most. I've been pulling together bits and pieces of work on a macro system, and I think I've finally got it into enough shape to at least let folks play with it. Be Warned: this code is hot off the text editor, and likely to be riddled with bugs. (Also, the UI is just terrible!) There is, as yet, no in-app documentation for the macro system, so let me give a short overview (some example pictures attached at the end of the post):

- Commands within a macro are executed in sequence. (No conditionals, no loops. I suppose those could be added later...)

- Only three types of command are available:

• Keyset Selection: switch to a chosen keyset. (During the execution of the macro, Pierogi will switch from the user's current keyset to this one, but will revert back to the original keyset after the macro completes running.)
• Key Commands: have the macro "press" a chosen key. (Note that I am not doing any filtering on keys here -- if you choose a key that doesn't exist in the current keyset, Pierogi will simply do nothing when executing that command.)
• Pause Commands: have the macro wait for a specified number of seconds.

- Each macro can be given a name.

- Each macro can be assigned to a user-defined button in the interface. (Currently, there is just one "User" panel with six user-defined buttons, that I've added to the "Universal" panel set... Still needs work here! )

- Each macro can be assigned to a keyboard key. (I'm working with an American N900 here, so I'm using the English keyboard. Hopefully, this can be extended to other keyboards in the future...) Any Pierogi panel that is not already using the keyboard for another purpose should allow you to execute macros by pressing their associated key (which means that most of them will).

- Sets of macros are collected into "macro packs". (Or, at least, they will be. I'm still working on this. Right now, all user-defined macros are being collected into the "User Defined Macros" pack.)

The user interface for all this is seriously bad (as you can probably tell from the screenshots attached below). The general concept is this:

1) You first go to the "Edit Macro Contents" panel (in the new "Macro Panels" collection),
2) Click the "Macro" button to bring up the "Select Macro" dialog box,
3) Click "New" to create a new macro. (You can give it a name here, and assign it to one of 6 buttons or one of 26 keys.)
4) You're sent back to the "Edit Macro Contents" panel. Now, you can click "Command" to add a new command to the macro.
5) Now here's the most annoying part -- the top button in the "Command Choices" dialog box lets you select from the three different types of command. For the "select keyset" or "select key" commands, you then have to go through a huge combo box of options to find the one you want. I've tried to break the "select key" commands into a handful of categories to make the job easier, but it'll probably take a bit of effort here to find exactly what you want.
6) Continue adding commands as you wish. (You can click on a command to delete it, or move it up or down in the list.)
7) Finally, you can hit the "Run" button to test out your macro.

As I've mentioned above, this is fresh, relatively untested code, so please be gentle with it.

Along with the "User Defined Macros" pack, I've added one other hard-coded macro pack (following a suggestion from Pierogi user Leo Pacman). Quite some time ago, phone companies began associating keys on the phone keypad with letters from the alphabet (associating a, b, and c with 2, d e and f with 3, etc.); today, most cell phones support text entry on a 10-digit keypad using this system, which is generally known as a "multitap" keyboard. As it turns out, quite a number of televison sets (and probably other devices) support this as well, through their infrared remotes. So, I've thrown together a set of macros to implement a "reverse multitap" keyboard -- e.g., press the "e" key, and Pierogi will emit two "3"s. Press "j", it will emit one "5". For "s", it will emit four "7"s, etc. Hopefully, this will let you use an actual keyboard for any device that supports multitap. If you'd like to try it out, you can enable the "Reverse Multitap Keyboard Macros" in the Preferences screen accessible from the menu.

In any case, I'm happy to finally have some sort of IR keyboard to offer folks!

And also in this release, there are some minor tweaks to the Creative, Grundig, and RCA keysets, as well as a bugfix to the RCA protocol.

Happy Macro-ing, and again, please inform me of any and all bugs you run across!

Ok so a huge new feature. Great!
Although having some difficulties with it (as you probably expected).

Firstly, yes the UI is not very intuitive and can be frustrating.
Although most bits seem to work after you get the hang of it.

One major problem is you can't go back and edit the macros commands, pressing the edit button seems to jump you to the Macro Properties Panel with no way to the edit section.

Also I seem to be having trouble with my first macro.
Some clever person decided to not have a sleep button on my LG TV's remote. It is hidden in the system menu with about 10 key presses.
So I though I would try your macro system out.

Fortunately your LG TV keyset has the "sleep" command so I have the following macro.

Sleep > Pause 0 > Sleep > Pause 0 > Sleep > Pause 0 > Sleep > Select

The first time it worked perfectly 30 minutes sleep timer, so I reset the sleep timer and tried again.
Ever since that first go it has not worked. It sometimes stops on 10 minutes with the dialog box left open on the TV, sometimes 20 minutes.

I have tried 20 times now and never got it to work like the first go.
What do you think?
I have even tested removing and extending the sleep commands to no avail.


Finally, although I like the idea of using the keyboard to fire off the macro's.
IMO is this not going to create conflicts if you decide to follow OMP and use the top row of keys for switching your tabs.

I wouldn't mind being locked to using the bottom row of the keyboard for my macro's in fact with the being only 6 user defined buttons "ZXCVBN" will be perfect to remember.

Also moving things about the command list would be better done from looking at the list IMO.
ATM you have to click the command to move then up and repeat as required.
If you had select and up down in the list view moving the things about the list would be a lot easier.
You could then have click on the command for "delete and "copy".

Just some ideas for UI improvements

Hello,
Thank for adding Cisco 8485DVB but is it possible to map key HDD to Disc Menu?

Yup. The current macros UI was quite literally an afterthought, after I managed to get a lot of the internal code working. (And, after fighting with it over the past week, I'm realizing that it should have been part of the forethought...) But I figured I should go ahead and let folks try it out, even if I had to rip it out and start over.

Yeah, I had this big idea to break everything down into "pack" / "macro" / "command" sections; but it hasn't made things all that much simpler so far. I don't really have a way to edit commands at all yet, you just have to delete and recreate them. I'll keep working on it...

Hmm. Sounds like I may be pushing the protocol timing a bit too hard; some devices really need commands to be repeated once or twice before they will acknowledge them. The current design just fires off a command once and goes on to the next one (and so it is like pressing a remote key very very quickly).

Also, a "Pause" of 0 seconds should essentially be a no-op. I'm using the Qt "QTimer" class for these commands, which can in theory support milisecond resolution, so I could put in support for fractions of a second if you need it...

I suspect you might be able to get it to work by holding the N900 right up to the TV's IR receiver. If so, it probably means that there is some interference / weak signal / incorrect protocol timing going on, and allowing the signal to repeat would alleviate the problem.

I'll try setting up the macros to hold a keypress long enough for it to repeat once.

BTW, the "power search" feature uses the same no-repeat timing; do you know if it ever fails to switch on / switch off your TV?

Hmm. Is the Open Media Player the standard? Let me take a look at it. If nothing else, I could certainly put an option in the Preferences window to setup the keyboard following the OMP system. (I do still want to allow the use of the entire keyboard when IR keyboarding is possible, as with reverse multitap.)

Thanks!

Actually, I had "move up" and "move down" originally as buttons on the side (along with others), but the number of buttons on the screen was starting to crowd out the actual command data. Let me see if I can rearrange things again.

Ack! "Copy"! I didn't even think of that. Very useful. Easy to implement, too. Let me throw that in...