For Christmas one of the gifts-to-myself was a Logitech Harmony Smart Control. This was to replace an aging Harmony 550 with some button issues. In the course of setting things up I wanted to get IR working with my Xbian installation on the Raspberry Pi. I needed to get an IR receiver and found that this SANOXY remote for ~$15 (at the time of this writing) came with a USB receiver that fit the bill. The smart control uses the Ortek VRC-1100 from the Logitech database for the controls.
Largely this is doubling a set of notes for my own future reference if I have to recreate what I did to get IR working with my Xbian install on a RPi. Conveniently, I hope it helps someone set this up for themselves. The code for the solution came from responses by CurlyMoo in the bug report Vrc-1100 usb remote not working on Github.
I replaced the default /etc/lirc/hardware.conf file with the following:
# /etc/lirc/hardware.conf
#
# Arguments which will be used when launching lircd
LIRCD_ARGS="-u"
#Don’t start lircmd even if there seems to be a good config file
#START_LIRCMD=false
#Don’t start irexec, even if a good config file seems to exist.
#START_IREXEC=true
#Try to load appropriate kernel modules
LOAD_MODULES=true
# Run “lircd –driver=help” for a list of supported drivers.
DRIVER=”devinput”
# usually /dev/lirc0 is the correct setting for systems using udev
DEVICE=”/dev/lirc0″
MODULES=”evdev uinput”
# Default configuration files for your hardware if any
LIRCD_CONF=””
LIRCMD_CONF=””
And ran the following command after running ‘sudo su’:
sed -i '$d' /etc/rc.local && echo -e "chmod 0644 /dev/tty0\nexit 0" >> /etc/rc.local
After that, it was just a matter of configuring the buttons on the remote to do what I wanted. I’m not sure that the last commadn was really needed, but its working and I don’t see a down side to leaving it in place.