Mailing List Archive

On 10/23/23 17:36, Will Dormann wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> In my quest to de-clutter my TV area, one annoyance that I have with
> my current setup is that I have a Harmony remote to do just about
> everything except for controlling my new frontend, which is a Fire TV
> Stick, which has no IR receiver.
>
> In the process of wondering if I could roll my own IR receiver setup
> for it, I noticed that this is a thing:
> <https://www.amazon.com/FLIRC-USB-Fire-TV-Edition/dp/B0BN39CVFD?th=1>
>
> My understanding is that this device presents itself to your device as
> a keyboard/HID device, and it also has an app to configure what
> buttons you want to be pressed when you press which button on your
> remote.
>
> Does anybody have any experience with using this device with a Fire TV
> stick?  Presumably this thing needs line-of-sight visibility to where
> you're sitting if you want any hope of success in using it?
>
> Similarly, I'm curious about how you configure a Harmony remote to
> work with this FLIRC device?  Does the device have some preset IR
> configurations that it uses, and you just pick whatever one(s) are
> supported by the device in the Harmony setup app?
>
>
> Thanks!
> -WD
>
No an answer to the actual question, but have you tried using CEC with
the fire TV stick? You can control all operations of the fire stick with
the TV IR remote. You will also be able to control it with a remote that
emulates your TV remote. Just enable CEC in your TV and the Fire Stick.

Peter


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On 10/23/23 17:36, Will Dormann wrote:
>
> In the process of wondering if I could roll my own IR receiver setup
> for it, I noticed that this is a thing:
> <https://www.amazon.com/FLIRC-USB-Fire-TV-Edition/dp/B0BN39CVFD?th=1>
>
> My understanding is that this device presents itself to your device as
> a keyboard/HID device, and it also has an app to configure what
> buttons you want to be pressed when you press which button on your
> remote.
>
> Does anybody have any experience with using this device with a Fire TV
> stick?  Presumably this thing needs line-of-sight visibility to where
> you're sitting if you want any hope of success in using it?

I don't use mine with Fire TV, just a couple normal FEs.  I have been
successful with aiming my remote at the ceiling and have the FLIRC pick
up the signal.

> Similarly, I'm curious about how you configure a Harmony remote to
> work with this FLIRC device?  Does the device have some preset IR
> configurations that it uses, and you just pick whatever one(s) are
> supported by the device in the Harmony setup app?

I use the configuration program on my Linux desktop.  It allows you to
select some pre-configured setup, but I usually select the Full
keyboard.  When programming, I click on the key or keys that I want to
be mapped and then I aim the remote at the FLIRC and press the button I
want.

It then acknowledges the programming and when pressing the button again,
will show on the graphical keyboard what keys are being triggered by
that remote button being pressed.

Doug
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On 10/23/23 5:52 PM, Peter Bennett wrote:
> No an answer to the actual question, but have you tried using CEC with
> the fire TV stick? You can control all operations of the fire stick with
> the TV IR remote. You will also be able to control it with a remote that
> emulates your TV remote. Just enable CEC in your TV and the Fire Stick.


Yeah, I did try CEC. While I was originally optimistic about the
concept, I found that troubleshooting the various component interactions
wasn't quite a rewarding use of my time. And I haven't even gotten to
the point where all the devices are plugged back in yet.

In my case, while I can get the fire stick remote to control the volume
of my audio amp via HDMI CEC, and I can get the amp to turn off when I
hit the power button on the Fire Stick remote, I can't get it to turn ON
the amp. Also, a few seconds after the amp turning on, it'll switch to
a completely unrelated input a few seconds after it's on. Oddly, when I
press the power button on my Fios remote, it handles the turning on of
the amp and the turning off just fine. Albeit with the same
switch-to-unrelated sound input after a small delay after it being
turned on. I'm not exactly sure why the difference between the two
remotes (Fire Stick vs. Fios), as in my simplistic view the remote is
simply telling the TV to do a thing, and it's the subsequently the TV
that tells the amp to do something via CEC. Perhaps it's not only the
fact that it's the TV controlling the CEC, but what it does perhaps
depends on

After a little bit of searching for the cause of my troubles, I found
this pretty quickly:
<https://www.reddit.com/r/hometheater/comments/rlh42d/all_my_equipment_is_fighting_over_hdmicec/>

The telling quote is the first response:
'There is no "fixing" "adjusting" anything with CEC, you're at the mercy
of whatever it feels like doing.'

Given the black-box nature of the CEC interactions, plus the fact that
you've got different vendors implementing seemingly what is their own
interpretation of how it should work, that's why I decided to stick to
my tried-and-true one Harmony remote to rule them all strategy. At
least in this case I actually have control over exactly what it's doing.

That is, until I've settled on the Fire Stick as my frontend/streaming
device, and realizing the consequences of not having an IR receiver for
a device to be controlled by an IR remote. :)

Update: re-reading your response, I'm just now realizing that CEC can be
used to have your TV's directional pad remote control the Fire Stick's
directional pad. And it does indeed work! Granted, not as low-latency
as the real remote, but it definitely seems doable. Somehow I must have
missed this as a CEC capability. So for basic Fire TV remote
capability, CEC might be all that you need. But for a more enhanced
remote experience, one still might want the FLIRC device. For example,
hitting the TV's "menu" button will still bring up the TV's menu feature
as opposed to the Fire TV's menu. Or perhaps more importantly, the TV's
play/pause button doesn't map up to doing anything expected via CEC.
Luckily LeanFront is a quick OK/Direction navigation to getting
play/pause functionality at least.

I predict that I'll still end up with a FLIRC device for the fire stick,
but for now the CEC route seems like a mostly viable compromise.


Thanks!
-WD
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On 10/23/23 5:36 PM, Will Dormann wrote:
> In the process of wondering if I could roll my own IR receiver setup for
> it, I noticed that this is a thing:
> <https://www.amazon.com/FLIRC-USB-Fire-TV-Edition/dp/B0BN39CVFD?th=1>

For anybody playing along, here's the review I wrote for this product:


What it does:
You plug in a USB power connector to the female side, and you plug the
male side into your Fire TV Stick. At this point, the FLIRC device
appears as a USB HID device to the Fire TV Stick, and the app-configured
Fire TV buttons are sent to the Fire TV device when you press buttons on
the remote.

How you set it up:
You connect a normal Micro USB cable into your computer. At this point,
your computer should recognize it as a HID device.
When you launch the FLIRC software, you select Controllers -> Fire TV,
which configures the FLIRC device to map the basic Fire TV remote buttons.
Hit Go and the FLIRC device will read IR commands from ANY remote. You
can pick any unused remote that you have around and it'll probably just
work. Or in my case, I told my Harmony remote to add a TiVo device, and
I selected that device when I went through the button learning process.
Once done, plug the FLIRC device inline to your Fire TV stick.
That's it! Your remote should control your Fire TV stick, including
buttons that you won't get via HDMI-CEC, such as the Info button, or
even the Play button.

The good:
- The IR receiver is pretty good. Better than the one that I had built
from parts for my old DVR.
- It's easy to program

The bad:
- The product software seems like it was abandoned a half-dozen years
ago. Either that, or the developers aren't into having a polished,
bug-free product.
- When launching the Windows app, it said that there's a Firmware
upgrade available from v4.9.6 -> v4.10.1. When I agreed to update the
firmware, it went through a process, rebooted the device, and said that
the firmware update was successful. But it's still at 4.9.6. Every time
I re-launch the Flirc software, I'm bugged to update from 4.9.6 to 4.10.1
- Doing a web search, I saw an article saying that the firmware update
may fail on Windows because of something with the boot loader. So I
figure I'd try Linux. Ha.
- The Linux downloads are on an HTTPS page, but link to HTTP for
the packages.
- There's a suggestion to pipe a curl to an HTTP host to sudo bash,
which is terrifying from a security perspective. The HTTPS certificate
for the server expired in 2022.
- After running the script, APT is reconfigured, but no software is
actually installed. Manually installing flirc via apt doesn't actually
install anything.
- After finally finding a Linux machine that seemed to be
compatible, the suggested packages to install did not map up with what
was available. I had to manually make a symlink to make it appear like
libreadline 7 was installed.
- After all of this, the firmware update process went exactly the
same as it did on Windows. That is, it said it was successful, but after
it was done it remained at 4.9.6
- Given that you can manually update the firmware with the Flirc and
flirt_util utilities, I figured that that'd be an option. Except for one
problem: Where does one download a firmware?
Apparently the firmwares and release notes are hard-coded into the GUI
application itself, and I've found no reference for where you can just
download a firmware.


Having said all of this, the product works. And I can control my Fire TV
Stick from my IR remote just fine.
But the whole experience left so much to be desired.

Tip: When choosing a micro USB cable, make sure that you have one that
actually does USB data and not just power. For me, it took until the 3rd
cable that I tried before I got one that allowed the FLIRC to be
recognized. I blame cheap USB-powered device makers that save a couple
of cents by skimping out on two conductors. During my troubleshooting
phase, I saw some posts suggesting that you need a USB OTG cable to use
this device. But at least with a Fire TV Stick, no, there's no special
cable required for programming it, and there's no cable required at all
to use it.


-WD
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