Remote control?

I'm also fiddling about with RPi audio. I'm not sure where this info should go, but it's here for the moment.

The cheap Chinese Hifiberry Digi+ knock-off board has an IR sensor on it, which in principle can be used to allow a remote control to do things to the system. Interesting...

A bot of research, and it seems you have to use lirc, the Linux IR Controller module. Acting on some hints/instructions in various fora, I've

• Modified my config.txt to include 
• dtoverlay=lirc-rpi (load the right module)
• dtparam=gpio_in_pin=26 (enable the GPIO pin IR sensor is connected to)
• Rebooted the RPi (took a couple of attempts, with an edit of config.txt for GPIO 26 from 27 - oops)
• Run mode2 -d /dev/lirc0
• Pointed my old Virgin Media TV box controller at it...
• Result! lots of pulse/space codes....

[root@Frontroom ~]# mode2 -d /dev/lirc0

Using device: /dev/lirc0

Using device: /dev/lirc0

Warning: Running as root.

space 16777215

pulse 10974

space 4670

pulse 753

space 577

pulse 731

space 551

pulse 726

space 586

Now I have to teach the lirc software the remote control buttons. It's a wet afternoon.

Update

I did managed to record something from the controller, a post on the runeaudio forum said irrecord didn't work on ArchLinux, but it seemed to for me. At least, it generated a file. I subsequently foundered on a number of errors from the lircd, like "can't find IR thing" and so on. Poo. Maybe I need to get it to work with another platform first, like Raspbian. At least I can now see how it could control the Rune player - it's basically scripts that use mpc, invoked when a specific event is detected.