One of the goals of the OpenRemote project is to centralize and manage remote control codes for all kinds of devices. The name for that database is Beehive.
The current situation, with badly formatted or proprietary binary and text files, distributed through web pages or printed in the back of the documentation of your TV for RS232, is a Big Mess.
We want to change that and provide a clean database with a REST/HTTP public API for reading and writing codes with a well-designed device database backend.
There are several code systems we want to support, the first being Infrared codes.
Infrared Codes
Some IR encoding background can be found here and here. Where can we get collections of IR codes to seed the OpenRemote database?
The LIRC project
This is a collection of flat text files in a difficult-to-parse format, created with the irrecord tool. The commands are send to the IR emitter as follows:
irsend SEND_ONCE <configfilename> <commandname>
The biggest problem is that the metadata of these codes is pretty much useless - headers are random. Needs extensive cleanup before it would be usable. It's also completely focused on remote control models
, not device models. Nobody knows the model of their remote control...
The remotecentral.com CCF/Pronto database
This collection of configuration files is for Philips Pronto universal remotes. These files are binaries that also contain the custom UI definition of a remote. The format seems to be proprietary and not documented well. The good thing is that the metadata is great, files are sorted by vendor and type of device.
Converting CCF to LIRC:
- Some folks seem to be working on a converter in python - not very interesting
- The Tonto project is a cross-platform (written in Java) editor for CCF files, basically replacing the Philips editor software. This would be an excellent starting point. The source is under Artistic License - which I need to read up on.
- This blog entry about conversion from CCF to LIRC, especially how we could get the discrete codes for PowerOn/Off and Input into the existing LIRC data.
- Someone wrote an extension to LIRC so you can send pronto commands directly.
