Philips SRM-7500

[godlike]

Hello,

I have an old Philips SRM-7500 (it’s an RF remote with a USB dongle) that I’ve been trying for the past few days to get it to work with Kodi on my CE box (CE-19 although I can update to 20 rc if needed). So far I’ve been unable to have Kodi pick up the remote events.

The remote does work. I tested it by running lircd manually (this remote requires some special LIRC parameters in order to run properly):

# lircd -n --driver=srm7500libusb --device=macShortAddress=12:34,remoteShortAddress=56:78,macPANId=9a:bc /storage/lirc/philips-srm-7500-lircd.conf

and then I can use irw:

# irw /run/lirc/lircd.socket

When starting irw, the remote dongle LED turns on, which means that the dongle is connected to the remote. Pressing buttons on the remote echo on irw’s output. So I know the remote is working fine and that CE’s LIRC version has support for the remote and its driver.

Problem is, I can’t get Kodi to pick up the remote button presses. Both the LIRC configuration and the Kodi Lircmap came from here. Kodi simply does nothing, and the remote LED does not light up even after restarting Kodi (it should light up to indicate that a LIRC client has connected and is using the remote/listening for events).

I know that running LIRC manually in this way is not the correct way to do it, as I should be using eventlircd. Sadly eventlircd has no configuration for this remote so I would have to write some udev rules from scratch for it (and possibly an evmap? Also I’d need custom LIRC startup parameters and the documentation is sparse). I wanted to first have something working with Kodi before turning to the eventlircd approach.

Any help/comments/suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Cheers,

[godlike]

Well I finally got it working. Manually of course, since eventlircd has little to no documentation and I have no idea how to even begin tailoring the classic Lirc + Lircmap setup for eventlircd.

In case anyone reading this stumbled upon the same issue, I used this lircd configuration alongside this Lircmap.xml file.

As stated in the first gist, lircd needs to be run like so:

# lircd -d auto --driver=srm7500libusb --device=macShortAddress=12:34,remoteShortAddress=56:78,macPANId=9a:bc /path/to/philips-srm-7500-lircd.conf

After doing so, you can check with irw that the remote pairs up (the red LED on the dongle lights up) and it’s working:

# irw /run/lirc/lircd

Last but not least, Kodi does not seem to use the proper lircd socket, which was driving me nuts. After stracing Kodi I found that it’s trying to open /var/run/lirc/lircd instead of /var/run/lirc/lircd.socket, so a simple ln should suffice:

# ln -s /var/run/lirc/lircd.socket /var/run/lirc/lircd

In fact, the moment I created the socket, I got a new client on lircd and the remote started working on Kodi.

Cheers,