Related to my recent IoT hacking, what started me down this path is the long term annoyance of my X10 lighting being unreliable. X10 has always been problematic due to it’s use of power line communication, this has gotten worse as we add more and more noisy electronic devices that cause additional feedback onto the house wiring.
With the X10 light switch I had an IR-543 which mapped IR (infra red) and the rest of my home theater gear is all IR controlled, so a single remote could control everything including the lights. Another nice feature of the X10 light switch I had was soft on / soft off – meaning that when you turned the lights off they would dim down to off, and the same for on. At the start of a movie this is pretty nice.
Of course with a wifi enabled light switch, how do I get IR control? This seemed like a good reason to DIY a solution and build an IR controller / repeater based on a Raspberry Pi. I found that it’s relatively easy to control Tasmota devices with curl, so I was able to easily turn the lights on or off using a simple program. I was pleased to discover that the new light switch also had the soft on / soft off behaviour.
To build an IR device on Linux, I first thought of LIRC as I’ve used this in the past. As I dug deeper, it seems the LIRC project is quite dormant and I was fighting with a lot of stale tooling. I was succeeding in getting something working with the various remotes I wanted to use but it felt like it was a lot of work. Then a friend mentioned ir-keytable to me which led me to the more modern IR control in Linux solution.
The short version of the story is that the ir-keytable support is in a similar state as the LIRC work. I believe this boils down to the fact that IR control is still very niche, and there are lots of hardware variables due to many different remote controls. If you want to do something simple: receive IR input to control a linux machine, then ir-keytable is the way to go. More complex situations may require LIRC. Both approaches have their challenges but ir-keytable is the more modern solution.
The rest of this article will be about getting ir-keytable going on Raspberry Pi OS with a TSOP4838 IR receiver. For my application I have a more complex set of requirements so I’ll be continuing with an LIRC based solution, but more on that another time.
