The Fugue

I've always been a software guy. I'm doing good if I can keep up with what good computer hardware is. But a combination of needing a way to control mplayer from the couch, poverty, and a desire to learn the useful skill of soldering drove me to create my own serial IR receiver for use with lirc.

I was afraid my first soldering project would be a disaster, but it really has turned out quite nice. At least, it's nice if you don't look at the back. :-) Check out the pictures on flickr.

I followed the instructions from the Linux Journal article, with some modifications. I didn't want it inside a DB9 case, I wanted to show off my geeky creation so I didn't cut up the perf board. I didn't want a DB9 connector, I wanted to use cat5 cable and an RJ45 to DB9 adapter that I had made previously. I used the IR Receiver from Radio Shack, model 276-640. The electronics store didn't have the precise voltage regulator called for but had one with the same output that could handle higher voltage so I got that instead.

If I were to start fresh, I would wish I had found these instructions instead. The LJ instructions are good, but these ones are better. I think I'd still use perfboard anyway, since I'm not encasing it in a DB9 hood.

The version of lirc-modules-source in Debian testing at the moment didn't work for some reason but the version from unstable works fine. I had a hard time finding out what model my universal remote is, but I was able to create a lircd config file for my DVD remote easy enough, and irw recognizes it fine.

I still have to configure mplayer but there should be nothing special to that. So I declare my IR receiver a success! Many thanks to Von for teaching me to solder, Jared for helping me in the initial research, and Erin for not putting up too much resistance to the idea.

For the price of a new Actiontech DSL modem/wireless router, I purchased a used Cisco 678 and a Buffalo AirStation WHR-G54S. I don't need to tell you which is the better deal.

I've been hearing some good things about Buffalo, and since you can't be sure what you're getting with a Linksys Wireless router these days I decided to go for it. I've just finished configuring it and now I have some opinions to spout.

First, it seems like a good router. It's pretty, has 4 ethernet ports, a WAN port, and wireless (of course), it's working fine, it's very configurable, and it's reported that OpenWRT runs on it. The cons are that it takes a lot of rebooting to configure, the wired port LEDs are in the back, and some of the terminology is a bit confusing. For example it does support WPA but nowhere in the manual is it called WPA, and only as an aside in the web interface do you realize that "AES" is WPA, when it asks for the WPA "previously-shared" key.

Some highlights from the configuration, that I had plenty of time to ponder while rebooting after every screen:

• WAN
  • Does PPPoE, DHCP, unnumbered IP, or static
  • can set the MAC address
• LAN
  • lots of DHCP server options
• Misc
  • NTP
  • Syslog
  • Very detailed system info screen
  • Logs, and granular control over what's logged (or what's sent to syslog)