ESP32 or ESP8266 Has anyone looked at them for IR blasting?

[perfessor101]

I've been thinking about using ESP32's or ESP8266's for tuning.

They are Wifi Microcontrollers.

One IP one IR blaster or 8 IR Blasters ?

They are programmed via the Arduino / PlatformIO interfaces.

They appear to have a good IR libraries.

Some examples I've seen with people using them via MQTT or their own webserver.

The esp8266's look like they can support one IR blaster each.

The ESP32's can support 8 IR Channels with transmission and reception.

I'm not sure how best to start with interfacing one with SageTV.

I have IR reading software for getting the codes in raw formats.

I've tried translating the pronto codes from the Shaw Cable remotes that SageTV already uses but they won't work to change channels when Blasted at the boxes.

Thanks for your time and idea's
Bobby

[JustFred]

I can't offer any specific ideas about how to interface to those devices, but I like the idea.

In general, Sage currently has 3 different methods of communicating with IR devices (listed in no particular order):

1. EXEMultiTunerPlugin
Sage can talk to this generic "device", which is actually just a shim that calls (executes) an .exe file of your choice. Sages passes the device name, device # and channel # to your exe. Folks have used this method to control cable boxes or other IP devices (including, I recall, some network-based IR blasters). Search the forums for details. Note that this "shim" is transmit-only. No way for Sage to receive input from the device. For your application, you'd need to provide the .exe that talks to your hardware, but wouldn't need to modify any existing SageTv code. If the microcontroller has some sort of internal web interface to control it, then command-line tools such as wget or curl could be used with EXEMultiTunerPlugin.

2. Hauppauge IR interface
Sage knows how to talk to Hauppauge's IR blasters, using Hauppage's software. Sage simply passes a channel # to the SINGLE Hauppauge IR device. Sage knows nothing about the actual IR codes involved. Learning IR codes is done via Hauppauge's BlastCfg utility. If you wanted to emulate a Hauppauge device, examine the existing Sage code (TunerStubDLL.cpp) and do a bit of reverse engineering.

3. Usb-UIRT interface
Sage knows how to talk to multiple USB-UIRT devices, via UUIRT's driver. Sage is able to both Rx (learn) and Tx. It seems to be able to deal with various IR code formats, without having knowledge of the code format itself. Take a look at the various (ASCII) .ir files in SageTv/Common/RemoteCodes. If you wanted to emulate a USB-UIRT device, examine the existing Sage code (uu_irsage.cpp) and do a bit of reverse engineering.

[Tiki]

I’m pretty sure someone got a networked ir blaster working too. Would have to do some searching to find info on it. Probably would have been a year or two ago.

[KeithAbbott]

Originally Posted by Tiki

I’m pretty sure someone got a networked ir blaster working too. Would have to do some searching to find info on it. Probably would have been a year or two ago.

Maybe this post: https://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=64372