Another IR dongle for iPhone

Found the RedEye Mini dongle for iPhone. Advertised at US$49 on their website. Tried to buy it but they don't ship to Oz. Seems they've given distributor rights to some tin-pot company in Oz and they want AUD$95!!, with the exchange rate almost at parity.

So I checked Amazon and found one shop selling it for US$38 but they wanted $35 for postage! Eventually found Amazon's offer which was the same price but only $9 for postage. So it looks like I will get the dongle for the equivalent of US$49 and the Oz sellers can go complain to the govt. about how they are losing sales to the Internet because no GST makes them cheaper (yeah, almost 100% cheaper).

Not sure if this dongle will be as open to program as the L5 but they might make an exception for the VTV. The use of the audio socket...

Oh blast, the use of the audio socket means it will probably disable the microphones in the iPhone. Screwed whichever way I turn: use L5 and lose charging port or use RedEye and lose voice input. Well at least the RedEye will make a good manual TV controller.

VTV

I might have the order of the apps around the wrong way here. Maybe I ought to be hacking the OpenEars sample so that, in addition to displaying the words it recognises, it also outputs the corresponding IR codes to the IR dongle. That's actually a lot easier to implement (I think). No need to install the IR code learning section nor the GUI section.

So devel steps:

1. Test VTV app with VTV vocab (clone OE sample app). (Especially test headset input.)
2. Use the L5 app to learn the hex codes for DTV controller and upload them to L5 hexcodes database.
3. Install the hex codes in VTV app.
4. Add a "dumb" controller which toggles "on" and "off" when each time voice input is detected. Can test this with my DTV tuner controller (or maybe even Apple FrontRow controller?).
5. Add IR output for all the vocab.

VoiceTV

A little bit later...

Have finally got around to working a bit on project. Have downloaded, compiled and run the L5 sample app on both the emulator and my iPhone. Have downloaded, compiled and run OpenEars library and sample app on both the emulator and my iPhone. OpenEars is an XCode wrapper around CMU Sphinx.

It looks like the restricted vocab for the controller will allow Sphinx to be recognise words pretty accurately. However I still need to generate and test a "TV controller" word list to replace the sample app's "mobile toy controller" list.

The L5 now uses the Phillips Pronto hex code format ("We are using a modified subset of the Pronto IR Format (http://www.remotecentral.com/features/irdisp1.htm).") This would be fine except the RemoteCentral library is seriously out of date wrt. Sharp Aquos TVs. It looks like I will have to manually load the codes from a controller .

So all I have to do now is find a way to fool the L5 sample app into thinking it's getting its input from its buttons when in fact it's really getting it's input from OpenEars recognised words.