serial (low speed) cable to control RCA Directv Box?

[padre]

Folks,

Where can I buy a serial cable to control my RCA DRD435RH DirecTV box? It has a the RJ jack (labelled low speed). I see lots of into regarding the use of the cable, and some previous problems, but I can't seem to find out where to buy one.

Also, what's the current procedure for getting it working under 1.4? Do I need to download/install Girder?

Thanks!

Kevin

[IKK]

You can actually make one yourself. All you need is a RJ10 handset cord they are the ones that are coiled and a serial to RJ adaptor we have them at are local Fry’s store here in California. If not into making one yourself you can check the Tivo web store they should also carry them.

[padre]

Thanks, but I'd rather just buy one. I went to the store.tivo.com site, and the "serial cable" they have displayed shows a serial connection (DB9) to mini phono jack connection. Is it just a bad photo (should really be a RJ connection, not mini phono jack).

[padre]

How about the "DirecTV cable pack" from the snapstream site? Will that work?

http://store.snapstream.com/dicaparre.html

[riekl]

I have this exact same receiver .. and i have the cable from snapstream, works just fine .. problem is .. sage doesn't natively support the new rca command set apparently.

Is there a work around for this to get sage to change channels on the 6th gen rca receivers like this ?

[padre]

I got my SnapStream cable a week and 1/2 ago, and its been working perfectly with SageTV.

What kind of problems are you running into?

[riekl]

padre,

Sage has no trouble changing your stations natively with your 435rh receiver ??

How odd .. sage doesn't change mine at all not even a flicker .. yet snapstream and the webremote utils have no problem changing via serial so i know the serial is connected good .. *ponder*

[padre]

No, Sage doesn't have any problem changing the channels. Weird.

[riekl]

Did you do any additional setup what so ever ? The only setup I did for the serial box was during the setup wizard it asks you if you are using IR/Serial or nothing, i picked serial, that is the only option i saw about changing channels.

Is there some setting somewhere else you had to change ? Or did change ?

[padre]

Well, the only difference I can see is how I changed my to support the serial cable.

The machine that I used is a new machine (a Compaq S4100NX) that is identical in configuration to my first PVR. So, I used Ghost to image the existing system, restored that to my new system.

After applying the new license key, I changed the configuration from IR to Serial (since my first PVR uses the IR200L). After that, it worked perfectly.

So I didn't follow the same steps as you (selecting the serial from scratch), but the routine in program should be the same.

[riekl]

Ok so you just did setup - setup wizard - add/modify existing source

and then selected serial .. ok i tried that to and still no go .. how very odd ..

[dkardatzke]

riekl,

Since you mentioned you are using direcTV serial control with SS, are you using the external plugin? If so, make sure this isn't running when you try to do the serial control through SageTV. As of v1.4 we removed the dependency on that plugin.

Does that help?