Simulating the *remote*, instead of the extender.

[bryanc]

Hi there. Someone over at the remotecentral forums brought this project to my attention, as I am attempting to do something similar for my own set up.

Except, what I am doing is in the other direction. I am trying to send commands from my computer to the RFX, in order to control the A/V equipment with IR.

The protocol analyzer has been a great help in making some progress. I am able to send some basic IR from my PC, and it is correctly received by the endpoint A/V equipment. (E.g. I can type a command into a shell and the TV actually turns off).

But it isn't quite ready to be used for real, because each time I successfully send a command, the RFX unit appears to completely stop responding to anything for approximately 10 seconds or so. This is probably because I am not following the exact expected protocol that an real Pronto remote follows. (E.g. the "HELLO" packet, followed by an "ACK", followed by the actual "SEND IR" command, followed by some back and forth I don't understand).

I'm wondering if anyone has really been able to understand exactly what this communication looks like, so that it can be replicated *without* causing the RFX to "lock up" for 10 seconds every time :)

I will spend some more time with the protocol analyzer and see if I can get it to work, and I'll definitely share my methods if I succeed, but I figured I would ask here, in hopes that someone has already done some of this experimentation.

[Joakim Eriksson]

I did play around with the idea of doing something like this however I for one gave up on it since the protocol they are using is all but obvious.

The basic idea I came up with was to not try to simulate every packet as such. Instead I would try to record the commands and let the program send back what it previously recorded. This of course would have the downside that you would need to let the proxy program learn the commands first and you would have to do it for every button/action you want to execute against the RFX.

But I wish you good luck on your project. It would be a very to be able to do what your trying to accomplish.

[bryanc]

Thanks Joakim, for your reply.

Yes, I think that recording the packets and playing them back will be the way that I go, rather than try and fully reverse engineer the exact protocol.

I don't think having to manually do this for each command I wish to send is to egregious, I only have to do it once.

[milence]

Hi there, I saw this posts and find there somethig usefull for project that Iam working on. It is about the smarthouse instalation and there is wall mount touch panel with visualisation. The customer once asked "can I turn on the TV using touch screen" ??? That was the triger that turns everithing up side down.

I have pronto TSU9600 with wireless extender RFX9400 (also have RFX9600). Beside pronto remote, there is a need to have control over A/V equipment through ethernet, but only basic functions like on/off. I set up the Prontonic like proxy and can read all the data from IP.

My question is what is it that I should do to ganerate IP telegram on a button created, for example, in a C# Visual .NET Studio, and how the telegram (datapacket) should look like?

If You have some usefull links to read I would be tankhull.

Best regards
Milan Jovanovic dipl.ing.

SmartHome, Belgrade
www.smartko.com

[Joakim Eriksson]

There are no documentation or anything like it to read since this is the prontos own protocol. Simulating the remote seems to be difficult at best since its a UDP protocol and they seem to have checks in the protocol to validate the packets.

I still would say going with the record-playback functionally as described previously in the thread is your best option.