[ale] Tivax STB-T8 Serial Interface

[krwatson at cc.gatech.edu]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of Adam
> Allred
> Sent: Friday, January 09, 2009 22:35
> To: ale at ale.org
> Subject: Re: [ale] Tivax STB-T8 Serial Interface
>
>  > There is a bit of delay before it switches so if you enter another
>  >channel change before it is finished you will get interesting results.
>  >
>  >    zir 63-3
>  >    zir 17-1
>  >
>  > In quick succession this ends up telling the box to switch to channel
>  >317-1. During a channel switch there is some feedback from the box. It
>  >may be necessary to parse this to avoid a channel change collisions.
>
> It looks like the box is waiting for you to press sel/enter on the
> remote. You know when you type in a number on a remote and the OSD shows
> what you type? It'll hang for a few seconds while it waits for input,
> and if you don't press enter, it'll finally just change the channel.
>
> Looks like it takes whatever input you give it and just overflows the
> previous input off until it receives an enter or a timeout.
>
> Try sending it a 'zir <channel> sel' and maybe it'll take that, or 'zir
> <channel>' and a separate 'zir sel'.

Adam,

That fixed it!! I did some experiments this morning based on your suggestion and found the following resulted in an immediate channel change.

zir 17-1<enter>
zir sel<enter>

The following resulted in an extremely rapid change to each channel.

zir 17-1<enter>
zir sel<enter>
zir 69-1<enter>
zir sel<enter>
zir 5-2<enter>
zir sel<enter>

The changed was so fast you could just make out the station id popping onto the screen as it switched to each channel. This completely eliminated the delay and channel confusion on the part of the converter.

I will be putting up a web page today with all the information I have gotten so far. Hopefully this will lead to some interesting uses for the box. It dawned on me yesterday that I don't have to use a VCR at all. Since I have a computer to do the channel switching and a video capture card I might be able to leverage a MythTV build to act as a DVR using the output of the converter box. Although I'm not sure how I will display the recordings as I don't think the card has video out. I think it's intended to display video on the computer monitor (ie. video teleconferencing). Looks like I have some hardware hacking to do.

Thanks Adam,
keith

--

Keith R. Watson                        Georgia Institute of Technology
Systems Support Specialist IV          College of Computing
keith.watson at cc.gatech.edu             801 Atlantic Drive NW
(404) 385-7401                         Atlanta, GA 30332-0280