It's been an amazing roller coaster of fun. From learning various programming techniques, sitting in on libusb development discussions, designing cases, designing software, designing websites, designing circuit boards, designing firmware, and marketing research, I have gained some invaluable experience and friends along this awesome journey.I'm finally there. Cases are being finalized, and software is being fine tuned. So since this once hobby has finally blossomed into a product, I'm happy to be showing off what exists, and not some paper sketch of an idea.Check out the site, almost everything is live other than being able to purchase the product or download software.Since there is no way I can possibly test the small differences in the many operating systems this runs on, or the millions of remotes that exist, I'm initially limiting sales of flirc to only 100 customers who can give some valuable feedback to help smooth out any remaining rough edges.You will get a 20% discount, so sign up to our newsletter to partake.
I'm going to constantly share ways to improve your media center, give all sorts of tips and tricks, and much much more.Here is a great article from wired (found on lifehacker) which goes into great detail to improve the sound quality of your media center's surround sound system.
A good friend of mine, Robert Curtis, has advanced me more in my technical knowledge than any book, school, or previous job. Whether from his patient teachings or his vast amount of well documented open source projects, I've become a far better engineer and owe many of my personal technical achievements to Rob.One of his most recent projects, I've had the pleasure of being able to contribute to, although only a small amount thus far.Rob, using core location, put together a great little program that does one thing very well, keeps tabs on your Apple Computer. Built in Apple's SDK, is an API called core location. Simply put, it is a common interface to obtain your location on any apple platform where the underlying platform knows independently whether you have GPS, Wifi, or Ethernet.ETPH stands for E.T. Phone Home. ETPH runs as background service on your mac and will calculate your location at any interval you specify. If successful, it will send your location to the included php file residing on any server of your choice with standard HTML, no need to setup port forwarding or have any additional device running on your server. However, you always have the option of using htpassword [link] to password protect your map and your php file. Using php, I created another file called map.php. The purpose of this file is to grab the last logged location and draw the google map. It also displays the last 30 locations in the etph.log file. Here it is up and running. What's to come:InstallerDocumentation Wiki page
I'm so happy and excited to say that my efforts weren't in vain. This past sunday morning, at 12:00 AM, I successfully communicated with flirc in windows. I was able to send control transfers down to my device and receive back data. This is actually huge news as I never was able to consistently get these results in windows using libusb 0.13 (legacy). A few hours later, I got flirc fully working in Windows. I had to adjust my firmware but it was a quick and subtle fix and took me a while to catch. If I ever open source my project, I'll be happy to share the details of this one.Things have gone exceptionally well in *nix. I haven't had a problem with libusb's portability until I tried to get up and running in windows. But since I'm nearing the final stages of completing my product, I have to get windows up and running.I'm going to get a little technical here in hopes that I can save someone else from pulling out their own hair too. I should also say that since I'm so close to finishing, this will reveal a little bit about the product.Libusb 0.13 has had it's limitation in windows, particularly with HID devices (hint hint hint). The problem is that windows basically claims HID devices and keeps users from having read/write access. If you want to do any custom commands, you're SOL. flirc is dependent on having custom commands as it's natural existence is the ability to have a special instance of a HID device without crippling the same driver assigned to that device by the OS.OSX and Linux worked great. But I was unable to send any vendor control requests down to the device so I began my long search of trying to figure out why. I enabled debugging, which wasn't helpful, and eventually contacted the developers of libusb-legacy.That thread eventually led me to libusb 1.0 where I asked if what I was trying was even possible. They said it should be, and encouraged me to port my application to libusb 1.0. So I started the process, which wasn't very hard.After ensuring my application worked on my Mac without a hitch, I booted up windows, recompiled with the correct libraries, and alas, it didn't work. I'll save everyone the details, it's a very long discussion and opened up a thread of ~50 emails with the developers.The real solution to my problem was to modify my firmware to be a composite device. Nevertheless, that still didn't work, until finally, we pin pointed the problem and came up with a solution.If anyone is interested, here is the thread, which is still ongoing.A very special thanks to Peter Stuge, Xiaofan Chen, and Pete Batard who made this project possible by being so sincerely nice and helpful. Not to mention the endless amounts of work they do on a free open source project, thank you.
I know that any visitor who find this site at this point in time, doesn't know what flirc is yet. So although a mystery, the only reason I'm keeping anything a secret is for one simple reason. I don't want to disappoint anyone.I'm an Apple fan. From the way they plan their products, their attention to detail, and finally, how they inform the public of their new products. I highly admire that approach because there are (well, shouldn't be) any expectations at the time of the product's release. However recently, rumors leak before the announcement and fake features overwhelm the public with excitement. All these rumors and possible features build up hope and expectations in the public.Take for example the popular CES show in Vegas at the beginning of every year. Companies from all over the world come to show their latest creation. Quite frankly, I never hear of half the show's popular products again. They failed to make it to the market for any number of reasons. Or, worse, they make it to the market, and the features promised or demonstrated on the prototype, are missing from the final product. I hate that, and I know everyone else does.Designing a product is extremely hard, and Steve Jobs learned early on that dreaming of a product is completely different from creating a product. Many times, a number of engineering challenges are faced in which you realize that the dream will change or modify dynamically over the course of the design. So why tell everyone about a dream. Dream's are meaningless ideas. The final finished product holds the value.I'm nearing the final stages of design, and products will be available to purchase at the very second the site goes live. I don't believe that my product is going to change the way we live. However, it's solving my number one frustration with an existing problem, and I'm sincerely hoping to have the same impact on others. So rather than having a page demonstrating the products capabilities, I'm designing the product in hopes to meet my own expectations, before having to reach everyone else's expectations.
flirc aims to solve a fundamental problem. The details of the product will not be discussed until it's release, however, as an avid user of open source software and hardware, I will constantly discuss and share my own engineering projects in this blog.
Lifehacker has a great article on beefing up your windows media center.The idea is to get the most out of not having a tv-tuner by maximizing your internet media list in Windows Media Center.Check it out
This is a great little article on lifehacker.Shows how to embed a media center into your furniture while discussing how to minimize the disturbing sound that comes from fans.
As well as things are going development wise and as much as I want to share what I'm doing, I can't until the release.But that's not to say that I can't share the great finds I'm coming across. Here are two great sites that explain non verbosely how to quickly make a debian package from source and host in on your own website for people to get with apt-get install.Building the source into a .deb packageHosting your own repositoryEnjoy, post questions.
Thanks to the wordpress iPhone plugin, visit blog.flirc.tv on your iphone and get a special formatted version of our site.It was really easy to set up, just add the plugin and enable it. Thanks Brave New Code.
Great article on lifehacker on how to pump up your media center:http://lifehacker.com/#!5768317/this-is-all-about-xbmc
It's been a wonderful and amazing journey getting to today. I have grown my knowledge, experience, and depth more than I can possibly describe. The biggest hurdle was not technical, it was not money, it was not time, it was persistence. Never giving up. I would often wondered if this would make any money, if people would like it, and if it's even worth doing. It was, even if I don't sell any, it was. Turning an idea into reality is not hard, but the magnitude and difference in turning that idea into a product is indescribable.I have just placed my first order for production which will be for sale to anyone in the US on February 1st (at the latest).The internal battle of how to release the application to the world is on-going. As I have strongly benefited from a number of open source projects, I am leaning towards releasing all source code to every application I release that utilizes flirc. The only thing that will remain closed, is the firmware.A special thanks to my wonderful and beautiful wife, who's constant support and love has made everything I do possible.
The downloads section has been updated to include the new Windows GUI. The software is packaged in a beautiful installer that installs the driver, CLI, and GUI with minimal effort. A special thanks to Eric, one of the brightest engineers I know and I'm happy to be working with him.The Linux GUI will be available shortly.
The purchase link is active, if you have trouble ordering because you are outside the US, please contact me via the support website.Also, please contact me and let me know which OS you are running, which media center application you are going to use, and how you heard about flirc, and you will receive our beta testers discount code.EDITCoupon code: b3ta_t3sters
It is with great delight that I welcome a close friend of mine to the Flirc team, Eric Schlaepfer. Eric is without a doubt, one of the most talented engineers in the valley. His accomplishments speaks for themselves as he graduated top of his class, is one of his companies top engineers, and has a wealth of knowledge that only a select few could ever hope to obtain in a lifetime.He recently won a 555 timer contest put on by Jeri Ellsworth with one of the coolest circuits I've seen (and still don't understand).Check out his blog Tube Time where he has several personal projects that are works of art. He will also be at the Maker Fair, make sure you stop by his booth.Eric is joining us as the Chief Technical Officer, and his work will be seen shortly with software updates that will be posted soon.
I can't believe it took this long to get boards. I used a company called Golden Phoenix, it's the same company Sparkfun uses. I figured, they must be reputable if Sparkfun uses and trusts them. It started out great, they got boards back to me very quickly and it was painless. However, when I ordered my first 'stuffed board' that's when things went south.First it was the Holidays, so there were delays. One and a half months later, I got 'samples' of my boards and guess what, they didn't work. I narrowed down the problems to a mistake I made on the BOM, and a mistake they made with the incorrect part. After I got the right components in there, it still didn't work. I debugged the boards and found that they sheared too close to the edge of the IR receiver and cut my ground trace to this component. So I let them know and one and a half months later, I have ~150 units. They of course also made me pay for shipping for every fuck up that they did...unbelievable.So what did I learn? I learned that "you get what you pay for". So what if they cost less than 'made in america' products? I ended up paying for it in time and energy, and that's much more important. So the question is what to do for the next build. In either case, it's important to minimize risk, and Cisco the problem, "get a second source".On sale soon, I promise this time.
Linux has been a fun treat. I am a little baffled why this was so much work. Creating a .deb file was not as simple as I thought it was going to be. To get what I needed to get done, I actually downloaded several existing deb files, like putty, and unpacked them and examined the various files inside.Once I got it, I created a script to generate a deb file for me, but it still needs work.I'm a huge fan of static linking. There are several programmers who make the argument, it will bloat programs and it isn't good practice. I say, Pfff!Flirc as a static compile in linux, is 8.6 MBytes. What is it when it's not a static compile? About 1 MByte. So what are the downsides? My server is going to send more data. It will take up more space on client computers. What is the upside? I don't have to deal with dependency nightmare that is arguably the major flaw in Linux. Worth it...I'm still having issues with libusb, so I I currently have two binaries. A 64 and a 32 bit. They have been posted on the Linux Downloads Page.Check out the bottom, add the repo to your source.list file and get automatic updates. Please remember to send me feedback.
Here are a list of changes. An update will come shortly after the weekend with the previously mentioned controller views i talked about in the last blog post. The 64 bit debian file still needs to get compiled and updated, but that should be posted soon. Although there is no reason the 32bit wouldn't work. Thanks again to everyone who gave feedback.Fixed----windows usb disconnect icon issuetext field in keyboard controller now shows modifierscleaned up menu itemsborder issues in different window viewscleaned up textlinux fontslinux performance issuesNew----Limiting GUI to only run one instancebackground imagecontrollers menuinitial support menu under helpcheck for upgrades menu item (not deployed)
The beta period has gone extremely well and I've received some great feedback. Still a bunch to do on the software and firmware side of things, but all in all, it went well enough to do the second build.Unfortunately, I'm almost out of inventory. At this rate, I might have a week left. I've put in an order, but it will take about a month to receive fresh inventory, leaving me about 3 weeks with nothing. What this will mean, I don't know, but it will give me some good time to improve the software and firmware without spending most of the day fulfilling orders and doing support. I'll try to keep this as a positive...
I went to visit the blog to share some awesome news, flirc is now patent pending.However, when I went to visit the blog, I get a glorious message saying, "fuck you" with a site redirection to some stupid hackors website that was obviously designed in 1994.How did this happen...going to share...Okay, let's try getting into the wordpress backend, logged in, everything looked fine. Wordpress is still intact. I notice there is wordpress upgrade available, so I hit that, maybe there was some security flaw. Wordpress updated, went back to the main page, still hacked.Okay, let's go one step further. I ssh into and start looking at the log files. Crazy, no one got into SSH.Okay, how about FTP? Looked through those log files, nothing....Scratching my head at this point, I go into the directory with wordpress and do an
ls -lah-rw-r--r-- 1 _www _www 6.1K Jun 30 20:23 index.html
Okay, here we go, there isn't supposed to be an index.html file in this directory, wordpress uses index.php. Opening this up, yup, it's some crap html with redirects and pop-ups. Okay, let's save it:
mv index.html index.asshat
Let's keep looking
ls -lah
Two more files owned by www and not me:
-rw-r--r-- 1 _www _www 124B Jun 22 20:55 jundab.txt-rw-r--r-- 1 _www _www 28K Jun 29 22:44 file.htm
Let's peek inside the file
cat jundab.txtMagelangCyber Was Here-Hacked by Jundab-thx Hmei7, kaMtiEz, k4l0ng666, boebefa, s13doeL, Dr. Cruzz , ibl13Z and you~
Okay, great, file.htm is still there, feel free to check it out. What a waste of time that must have been to do.So how did this happen. Let's go into /var/log and check.
cd /var/loggrep jundab -ir *
Ahah, found it in apache2/access_logHere is the line: "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 404 1075 118.96.148.7 - - [22/Jun/2011:20:55:39-0700] "PUT /jundab.txt HTTP/1.0" 201 308Mother Fucker.... so for someone to be able to do this, they used the standard HTTP PUT method. How? Simple:
curl blog.flirc.tv/ --upload-file jundab.txt
Did that from another machine, bam, transferred. So you can just transfer files to webservers? Yes and no. I made a huge error. For this to be possible, my root directory of the blog was writeable by www. I believe the set permissions were:
drwxrwxr-x 40 'user' _www 1.3K Jun 30 22:34 blog
Yeah, that's bad. How do you fix this? Change it so it's not writeable by apache.
chmod 755 blogls -lahdrwxr-xr-x 40 'user' _www 1.3K Jun 30 22:34 blog
So this small error could have been a lot of trouble. I found it pretty close after it happened, but that doesn't matter. Drop a php script on there that has an exploit, call the php script from a browser, and I'm done. There were no php scripts, so thankfully, it was probably a BOT that runs around and try's putting files on servers. But in any case, the server was hacked and the only way to recover is to assume the system has been compromised, and restore.
I've updated the 64 bit linux binaries, although you can download the 32 bit deb file and install it just fine on a 64 bit OS.The reason this would work is because I've temporarily given up on static linking. I don't know why, but for some reason, the static compile of the QT GUI was horribly slow, and created artifacts on the screen. I eventually compiled the libraries again with a bunch more options enabled and got the application to run without the artifacts, but it was still extremely slow. I felt it was not acceptable in the standard of quality I want to set. So I bit the bullet and compiled dynamically adding all the necessary dependencies.The font also doesn't look funny in the GUI anymore, so overall, I may just leave it like this. I spent far too much time compiling the QT libraries, and I've got more important things to do.Here is our list of goals:1. Finish filing patent on proprietary algorithm powering flirc.2. New version of GUI with more programming views3. Update video with new GUI on home page.4. Documentation and Help Section of the Site5. Firmware wake from suspend support6. Firmware repeat key detects
There was an update posted tonight for linux 32 bit, and OSX which addresses a problem when you save a configuration file. This crashed the application and also happens on windows and linux 64 bit, but those updates are coming soon.This was a very intermediate update. I wanted to address that issue before the next release which is going to be big, I'll post about that in a couple of days as it rightfully deserves it's own article.
A special thanks to Alex Korzh, an aspiring attorney who drafted the patent for flirc and did an amazing job. Not only am I lucky to have him do the patent, we're happy to say that Alex is now part of the founding and executive team at Flirc.
I hope it was worth the wait. I'm sure there are a few things to iron out, but overall, this is a very large update. Eric has re-architected the way the GUI works. No longer is anything hardcoded, he has re-designed everything from the ground up in a clean, elegant, and scalable solution. Each window is brought into the GUI in the form of a vector graphics image, and an XML file.The graphics image is in an SVG file format. The SVG format is actually editable as text, but it is a graphics file. All the windows in this version of the GUI have been re-done in the SVG format. The purpose of this file is to group elements on the display, keyboard keys mainly. The keyboard keys have two colors, and are grouped and labels accordingly.The xml file is used to tell the GUI what to do. Fields tell the GUI what keygroup to display, and what to swap it with when moused-over. There is more, but I won't digress into technical jargon.We will grow the shortcuts windows with time, and extend the application to pull these from a central location on your machine. You will be able to add your own windows into the folder, and of course, share them via our site.Hope everyone likes it, thanks for all the feedback, and let me know how it goes.
There is a new firmware version that I will be testing. This adds better support for the RC6 protocol aka WMCE and XBMC remotes. This will most likely make it on all new devices, which means that people who receive new hardware wont really need to read further.However, because I'm changing some code quite a bit, this will mean that any existing customer may have to re-configure their remote. There wont be an easy way to transition a saved configuration to work with the new firmware. However, unlike Apple, I let you downgrade the firmware in case you accidentally upgrade, and don't want to upgrade if you are happy.In this same version of the firmware, I will address a bug which effects some users where flirc is broken after a wake from suspend.I will also add a 'wake from suspend' button, as a temporary medium until I figure out how to do this automatically.
Whew, that wasn't nearly as bad as I thought. I've been hosting the website on my home computer, which is a mac mini, also hooked up to my living room flat screen. I figure,. Which is fun, lets me be in control, and I love having a server available all the time, and from anywhere.
My initial round of pre-orders shipped on the date promised. The version of firmware that shipped with those is 0.7, newer than what most people have, which is 0.6. Firmware 0.7 had some general enhancements related to the algorithm so that this RC6 protocol would work better. The occasional remote that doesn't, I believe is because the remote is operating at a different modulation frequency. I'm going to get to the bottom of that soon, and if this is the case, I may add an ordering option for this.Because the firmware works a bit differently, this may mean that people upgrading from 0.6 to newer will have to reprogram their remotes. Not the biggest deal, but something of which I tried to effortlessly avoid. There is no way to convert a users configuration file because of the how flirc works.FW 0.8 is what will be shipped to customers via the 0.96 GUI update. However, I don't have a handle on the bug where flirc is not detected after sleep. I can't reproduce this problem so it's a bit harder for me to tackle. On top of this, I've been pre-occupied with windows issues.GUI v0.94 and 0.95 released. These are general stability improvements and all the download links will be at 0.95 shortly, windows will be tonight most likely.FW 0.9 will solely address the issue where flirc isn't being detected after a wake on sleep, unless I magically figure out what's wrong in the next few days. Here is where you can track fw updates.I found out why wordpress wasn't emailing me notifications for comments, so expect quicker responses there too.
My initial round of pre-orders shipped on the date promised. The version of firmware that shipped with those is 0.7, newer than what most people have, which is 0.6. Firmware 0.7 had some general enhancements related to the algorithm so that this RC6 protocol would work better. The occasional remote that doesn't, I believe is because the remote is operating at a different modulation frequency. I'm going to get to the bottom of that soon, and if this is the case, I may add an ordering option for this.Because the firmware works a bit differently, this may mean that people upgrading from 0.6 to newer will have to reprogram their remotes. Not the biggest deal, but something of which I tried to effortlessly avoid. There is no way to convert a users configuration file because of the how flirc works.FW 0.8 is what will be shipped to customers via the 0.96 GUI update. However, I don't have a handle on the bug where flirc is not detected after sleep. I can't reproduce this problem so it's a bit harder for me to tackle. On top of this, I've been pre-occupied with Windows issue.GUI v0.94 and 0.95 released. These are general stability improvements and all the download links will be at 0.95 shortly, windows will be tonight most likely.FW 0.9 will solely address the issue where flirc isn't being detected after a wake on sleep, unless I magically figure out what's wrong in the next few days. Here is where you can track fw updates.
Windows is lagging a bit behind and will be posted tonight, however, the GUI is now at v v0.96 and firmware is now at v0.08Both 64 bit Linux and 32 bit Linux were updated too, I know the 64 bit fell behind, but that shouldn't be an issue anymore.The GUI now displays the current firmware version as well as helps with a problem where the device can get stuck in DFU (Device Firmware Upgrade).The latest version of the firmware has been embedded inside the GUI, and will prompt you before upgrading.We've certainly come a long way, and will take the beta name off everything soon enough.
I received the next batch of boards, I shouldn't be sold out for a while. I'm finishing off some last details and pre-orders will start shipping Friday and continue until Monday. All pre-orders will ship by Monday, thanks everyone for your patience.
I can't say it's a shock, we all knew it was coming, but it's still a truly sad day. Steve Jobs will forever be known as the world's greatest CEO, he changed everything.But what's truly amazing, was the constant fight and resilliance of an individual that did not ever want to give up. "I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO". I could only imagine how absolutely terrible he must feel physically, and mentally, to have sent that letter which was probably written at another time.Steve has not been well for a while. When I first saw him a few years ago on stage I knew something was wrong. Call it a survivors intuition. When I go to the hospital for my checkups, I'm surrounded by amazing people, all of which who are fighting for their lives. Steve looks like he has been fighting for his life. Over the last few years, there was sign after sign. The liver transplant was a pretty big one. The livers is a regenerative organ, one which you can cut in half, and it will grow back. People don't get liver transplants, it's a hard and dangerous procedure, and when I was diagnosed, I had doctors tell me it wasn't even an option. (thankfully, my cancer was contained and didn't spread to anything like the liver).In his last speech to announce iCloud, it was extremely obvious to me how much his health had declined. Every word was a reach for breath, almost as if he had just gotten out of bed. Then the news came where he pulled in the release of his biography for three months. You don't authorize a biography in the middle of your privately kept life.I've heard that Steve has been on campus every day, talking with his staff. I can't imagine how difficult this could be. He's fighting for his life, which you would think he'd want to be enjoying outside of work. It truly says something about his devotion to his company, and to the people at Apple which he's always gratefully acknowledged in his keynotes.From the bottom of my heart, I wish Steve all the best in the world, and hope he wins his fight. Apple, and Steve Jobs, has been the sole reason and motivation for which I'm always striving for perfection.
For those orders placed in the past week, they will go out this Saturday, Pacific time. I'm so sincerely sorry for the delay, I usually can make every order go out next day, however this week has been extremely stressful and busy. There is no reason they haven't left (bad parts or firmware or software, everything is fine) other than me being completely and utterly swamped.There is also a bug in fw v0.8 which will cause a lot of headaches, a key can randomly be deleted. I have fixed this and the fw image will be a part of the next GUI, but for those who want to get it now, please do so here: fw_0.9.binThe orders that ship out will have this version pre-installed.The sleep issue that some users experience is still outstanding. I've tried about every OS's on 15 different hardware machines. I can't reproduce this. Multiple modules and multiple reboots, sleep, and hibernations, and everything on my end is rock solid. A good friend of mine has about 10 machines, I will spend the weekend at his place trying to reproduce the problem. I'm certain, once I can reproduce this, the problem will be resolved rather quickly.That's it for now. I'll try to knock out some of these other promised firmware features soon.
I'm confident that the v1.0 firmware release has fixed the sleep/cold start issue described in the last post. If anyone is still experiencing this after the firmware upgrade, please, say so.A special thank you to everyone giving me feedback and testing the non public images. I'm forever grateful for you guys, your patience, and understanding.Here is what's on the drawing board for the near future. There are two issues outstanding with the firmware, which I have been making slow and steady progress. Check out this page for past fw release notes, and future firmware feature release notes. This page will get updated with tentative release dates.I will also be putting together forums. This will bring a social advantage for users to share their setups, post problems, request features, and try/discuss beta firmware releases. This has been a long time coming, but with everything quickly stabilizing, a very important necessity.But before I start publicly releasing firmware images, I'm going to be taking a break to work on finalizing one of the most important aspects of the project, the API. We will be putting together a C API for users to integrate all of the flirc functionality in their own programs. We will also be releasing source code for a QT GUI which act as an example usage program. All in this time, the public GUI will be updated for better stability.I will post API news and updates via the blog, as well as share when the forum goes up. Beta firmware releases will all be done in parallel, which will be available to anyone who wants to try them, but I don't expect to integrate them into the GUI until the API and GUI are stable.Thanks to all the great customers who make every ounce of effort worth all the hard work.
I'm calling out for your help regarding an issue effecting a small amount of users. I have been unable to make any progress on some of the other firmware features because there is one major bug that I can not re-produce, and can not solve. I'm spending all my time on this one, so I'm asking for your help.When you wake your computer up from sleep, and your flirc no longer works and requires you to unplug/plug, then please leave in the comments section the following:1. Operating System [Linux/Windows/Mac]2. Operating System Version [Lion/Snow Leopard/Hardy Heron/Vista/etc] (32/64 bit as well)3. Your Motherboard Manufacturer (If you don't know, leave your PC Model)Even if I have talked to you previously, please post a note in the comments section. I need help narrowing this down and will most likely purchase an identical unit.
Flirc forums are live.I haven't had much time to play with the forums, but I added some general places for people to start posting. If I missed something and get a lot of spam, I don't have much time to run through everything again, and will temporarily shut them down. Hopefully this wont be the case.Don't mean to be pessimistic, but I have a lot on my plate. While I know this is overdue, I don't want to have something that sucks my time. Remember, this is just primarily me, and I'm doing my best.
We've finally finished our API. A special thanks to Eric who has really helped make hard work materialize into a high standard and an acceptable product.We haven't released this publicly for general consumption yet, although the plan is definitely to get this out on the open. I'd certainly like to put the project up on Git, which will be our set of libraries and a small example application written in QT.Please touch base with me if you would like access to this before the public release (probably very early next year).I will pick up work on the beta releases of the firmware. I strongly believe that the repeat issue is done, and will be working on the waking up a sleeping PC firmware.I'm extremely pleased how well everything is maturing, and certainly hope that it shows in nothing but a beautifully simple and easy to use product.
The forums are live, and pretty hot. I should have done this sooner in retrospect, but I don't think I could have handled the additional work.I've started a forum, you'll need to register to try this out, but for those who can't wake up their machine from sleep, this is a fix. It's not a solution, but a temporary fix.This temporary fix will allow you to pair a button on your remote with a special command that will tell flirc to send a 'wake-up' signal to the computer which is in hibernation or sleeping. This wont be needed in the future, any button will essentially do this.Here is the link:Wake-Up Command Beta Release ForumPlease post in the forum with questions/feedback. Don't use this comment section of the blog.Happy beta testing!
Here is a sneak peek on the latest features of the new software. It's a massive overhaul of awesomeness. The new architecture will allow you to drop your own XML and Graphics file in a directory, they will automatically show up in the GUI allowing you to make new shortcut windows to share with your friends. Eric has thought about this for a while and it's scalability is amazing and impressive.Also included in the next release will be firmware version 0.6, nothing new, but a very important update to improve stability.
I'm hopefully confident in this new approach. Check out the forum thread release which has much more detail and instructions.Happy Beta Testing and reply directly in the thread to share feedback.Here is the link again: http://forum.flirc.tv/index.php?/topic/93-beta-firmware-release-v2/
Those of you with Apple style remotes, or remotes that don't repeat while holding the remote button down, I've got a FW beta release you can test.The changes to the firmware were very minimal, I don't expect anything can go wrong, so don't be discouraged to try this if you are experiencing this missing feature.Please post feedback directly on the forum and not in the comments section below.Long Key Press Beta Release ForumThanks Everyone!
I wanted to send a message out to everyone and wish you all a happy and healthy new year. This project has been an amazing fuel for my personal determination. I'm grateful for all the customers out there, and the amazing support and dedication they have shown to me. I wish there was a word beyond 'grateful', because I would use it.I'm truly surprised by the customer experience. I never imagined it would be as good as it's been. From pseudo7 and eskro's support on the forums, to the emails I occasionally get thanking me, it's only these things that keep me focused, determined, and make all he hard work worth it.From the bottom of my heart, thank you.
A big thing that was missing was support for media center keys. Yes, flirc shows up as a keyboard, so where was the support for your itunes/winamp controls? Play, Pause, Eject, etc.I looked all throughout the internet, and finally found a single document that pointed out some technical information that I needed. I made some modifications to the firmware, and bam, they are up, running, and they are working great.This is pretty big for me, it represents a milestone and achievement as this was a feature I personally desperately wanted, and knew existing and future customers would too. I will follow up tomorrow when my eyes aren't bleeding with tears, a forum link for registered users to download and try this out. But the modifications were so slight, this will most likely be rolled out.A quick status update on the other beta firmwares. Repeat is solid, functional, and stable. This will be rolled into the next release, in fact, I may just put it in the media key release. Wake up a suspended machine is almost there. I'm digging through the USB spec and am getting solid knowledge in order to understand why this wasn't working.
Here it is for the testing:http://forum.flirc.tv/index.php?/topic/98-beta-release/Please post in the forums to report feedback.
I've just released a new beta firmware image which is for waking the computer up from sleep. It's available on the forums here:http://forum.flirc.tv/index.php?/topic/115-beta-firmware-release-v5/I've stopped working on the media keys, there is a bug in the last beta version that caused flirc to disconnect, I've since solved that but haven't posted an image to try. I've verified on windows that these keys don't work, and I'm baffled. Everything works great on OSX, but doesn't work at all in windows and I'm not sure where I've fallen short. I think windows may need special support for this, but I'm finding very little documentation online that would help solve this. I'm not giving up, but just wanted to give everyone an update.
