Lirc with REALmagic

Sigma Designs' Hollywood+ comes with a nice remote control and a serialport dongle. They have the word REALmagic stamped all over them.

Lirc supports them. What you want to do to get them working (at least on debian):

Serial ports on linux are named /dev/ttySx where x is the number of the serial port. So when I have my dongle connected on the first serialport, the device is naturally /dev/ttyS0

I used  to check if that was the correct port. If it is the correct port a red light should blink in the dongle as you use your port.

cp /usr/share/doc/lirc/remotes/sigma_designs/lircd.conf.realmagic /etc/lirc/lircd.conf

Then you edit the /etc/lirc/hardware.conf LIRCD_ARGS=""


 * 1) Don't start lircmd even if there seems to be a good config file
 * 2) START_LIRCMD=false


 * 1) Try to load appropriate kernel modules
 * 2) LOAD_MODULES=true

DRIVER="pixelview"
 * 1) Run "lircd --driver=help" for a list of supported drivers.

DEVICE="/dev/ttyS0"
 * 1) If DEVICE is set to /dev/lirc and devfs is in use /dev/lirc/0 will be
 * 2) automatically used instead
 * 1) MODULES="lirc_dev lirc_serial"

LIRCD_CONF="/etc/lirc/lircd.conf" LIRCMD_CONF=""
 * 1) Default configuration files for your hardware if any

Note that if you start lircd manually it won't read hardware.conf, that's done by the /etc/init.d/lirc script.

Also notice that lircd wont open the port and the light wont blink until some client wants to read it. For this a handy tool is  that will spit out the names of the buttons you are pressing.

Notice that you need NO SPECIAL KERNEL MODULES and you DON'T NEED TO USE SETSERIAL. There are a lot of false information on the "interweb".