Hi Backers
We have just started emailing the download intructions for AnalysIR.
If you have not received your email within the next 3 hours, please send us a message vis IGG or directly via email. info@A?????IR.com.
tnx
All posts by User Two
Announcement: AnalysIR – full roll-out
Hi All
Just a ‘heads up’ to let all backers know that we plan to issue the next release of AnalysIR to everyone within the next 12 hours, as originally planned.
During the last 4 weeks we have received both valuable & contructive feedback, resulting in over 100 Updates or fixes and which also include a selection of new bonus features. As with all new Software, we expect to have more issues reported and we will continue to issue new releases with fixes and additional features monthly or weekly until then end of 2013, as required.
We are very excited about AnalysIR and thanks to the great feedback & suggestions received so far, it is now a much more feature-rich and comprehensive tool than we ever imagined when we embarked on this campaign. We would encourage you all to continue suggesting enhancements and reporting any issues or usability improvements over the coming months.
Download & installation instructions will be contained in the email to be issued later directly to backers. This will be an 0.9.x release and we hope to upgrade this to a 1.0 release before the end of the year.
Thanks again for all your support!
Update: AnalysIR Phase 1 roll-out, Arduino Due
Just a quick update to let you know how things are progressing with the phase 1 roll-out.
Today we have issued our 2nd release to the initial participants which includes 22 updates and fixes to AnalysIR plus many other updates to the User Guide. AnalysIR has benefited greatly from the feedback received with a bonus of more features added.
We have recently received an Arduino DUE and have succeeded in porting our existing Arduino code to this new device. The porting was surprisingly quick and very few changes were required, which is all credit to the Arduino Team for making it so easy for us. The DUE code will be merged into our release cycle sometime over the next month or so.
So far we have had mainly positive results on the Arduino platform. However, the Raspberry Pi platform (RPi) is presenting more challenges than anticipated. The good news is that we believe we have a workaround for RPi and we will work on resolving any trailing issues over the next weeks. Another aspect of the RPi roll-out is that it requires greater knowledge of things such as Linux, networking and compiling on the RPi for users. We will put some thought and effort into trying to simplify this experience – but this may take more time than anticipated. Arduino is just so easy to use…..
At this time, we would also like to open up the phase 1 roll-out to another 10 backers on a first come basis. So the first 10 emails to arrive in our inbox, from backers, will receive an invitation. You can use the IGG message feature for this or just email info@A?????IR.com (replace the A?????IR with our name). To participate you will need an Arduino or RPi and an IR receiver and of course time.
At this point we still expect to release AnalysIR to all backers in or around Sep 30th.
Finally, many thanks again for all your support and patience.
Update: AnalysIR availability & roll-out plans
Hi All!
I just received an email from one backer enquiring about when AnalysIR will be available for download. Here is an edited copy of our reply, in case any other backers have the same question.
As described on the main Campaign page & updates – we have already issued an invitation email for the phase 1 roll-out, which will begin next week and runs for the next 2-3 weeks. The ‘phase 1 invitees’ were selected as per the criteria on the main campaign page (early backers & backers who contributed the most)
If you did not receive an invitation for phase 1, you will receive an email with details on how to download and register AnalysIR after the phase 1 roll-out is completed. (Hopefully in less than 3 weeks or before September 30th 2013).
Thank you for your understanding and support.
The AnalysIR team
Quick update: Kits are ‘in the air’ & Getting Started Guide
Quick update:
All IR starter Kits are ‘in the air’ and on their way around the world, including the ones requested this week.
We have completed updating the Getting started guide and have installed a website CMS, discussion forum & bug tracking system on our website. However, we don’t plan to expose anything on our website just yet.
We will continue to work through our task list for the remainder of this week.
…..more later.
Campaign completes successfully at 208% of Target & 150 Backers
Wow, what a couple of months this has been with over 1,300 emails received, new partners, over 4,168 referrals to the campaign, 208% funded, several world firsts with IR on Arduino & Raspberry Pi and most importantly backed by 150 people from 32 Countries across the globe. Not to mention some great bonus features added to AnalysIR along the way, some of which have been inspired by our backers.
Our tasks for the next week include, progress on the following:
– Documentation
– Installation Package for download
– Some bug fixing
– Online bug tracker
– Online discussion board
– Web site
– Select & Issue email Invitations to 1st phase roll-out participants
– Ship remaining kits.
I would like to finish up this update by welcoming our latest backers and thanking all our backers for your support.
The AnalysIR Team
Update: The kits have landed, roll-out plans & Arduino vs Raspberry Pi performance
We posted another update a couple of days ago covering many of these points, but it seems to have evaporated (Maybe I forgot to hit the ‘Post’ button).
We know some of the kits have arrived locally in Ireland. However, one backer reported that the packaging was ‘compromised’ but that the components were OK. He sent us some photos & we will now update packaging on all future kit shipments. If any backer experiences a problem with the packaging, email us and we will sort it out. We plan to post the next batch of kits over the weekend or early next week.
On the Raspberry Pi front we have learned some differences compared to Arduino. For what we are doing with AnalysIR, Arduino appears superior, which was initially surprising considering the 16MHz vs 700Mhz CPU speed. But apparently, it’s because Arduino is dedicated exclusively to IO & RPi is a linux based OS doing lots of other things simultaneously. I believe RPi may perform better with kernel patches or over-clocking, but we don’t want to go there yet.
Yesterday we got the measurement of IR modulation frequency working on RPi using GPIO. This may be a world first for both Arduino & RPi. The only downside is that we cannot decode the signal & measure the modulation frequency simultaneously on the RPi, which we can on the Arduino. So for now, we will just provide a command line facility on RPi for measuring modulation Frequency. We have also written a script to take the raw output from LIRC on the RPi and convert it to AnalysIR format via LAN, which means we can also use LIRC as a real-time recording mechanism on RPi. (In theory, it should be easy to extend this to every other Linux platform with LIRC installed)
One bonus with the RPi is that we can already decode & analyse IR signals over the LAN, a feature which the Yún will also provide via WiFi. We also read the blog post on the upcoming Arduino Yún release and can’t wait to get AnalysIR running on it…… The Yún should work out of the box, via serialUSB as it also has a Leonardo on-board and we will have to write up some small script to enable the WiFi part (Oct+ time-frame for WiFi).
Regarding our planned roll-out (circa 9th Sep), we plan to stick with a 2 phase approach as outlined on the main campaign page. If there are additional slots available for the initial phase we will contact backers directly. The reason is to avoid wasting time for 100+ people with a new release.
I would like to finish off by thanking you all for supporting AnalysIR.
Update: AnalysIR network enabled, Kits, RPi, Yún
The first set of kits has shipped today and because we were able to get a discount on the components we also included some bonus components as a gift (2 x npn transistors, 4 x 100 ohm resistors & 4 x 4k7 ohm resistors). These extra components may be of use to those who want to build their own IR led Driver circuit with the TSAL6100. We didn’t realise that shipping components was such an ordeal (individual Customs & Air Safety declarations depending on destination). The shipping cost was more than budgeted, but was also offset by the discount achieved.
On the Raspberry Pi front, AnalysIR is now running well without any noticeable glitches. The approach we have adapted is to connect to the RPi over the network. The solution was to pipe the output over the LAN to a virtual serial port on the Windows PC. The virtual serial port utility is freely available for Windows and the network stuff on the RPi is just standard shell commands. I should point out that we haven’t yet tried to measure the modulation frequency on the RPi, just straight decoding though the IR Receiver. When idle we are using only 1.3% CPU on the RPi, when recording a single signal it goes to 1.6% CPU & when full out recording IR it goes up to ~ 4.9% CPU usage. This is pretty good as it doesn’t impact on other processes; considering our first attempt was using 99% CPU when idle 🙂
The potential to decode & analyze over a network may lead to some interesting features in future – ideas welcome. As a minimum, the work with the RPi will make the port to the Arduino Due easier (we are expecting a Due next week) and also when the Arduino Yún is released with WiFi
Update: Campaign reaches 100 backers, RPi & News
We have now reached 100 unique backers for AnalysIR and we would like to thank you all for your generous support & welcome our latest backers. In particular, we would like to give a special thanks to those who made donations without perks.
And now for the News:
- The components for the Starter Kits have arrived as expected; the envelopes are already printed with addresses taken from IGG & we plan to drop them off at the Post Office sometime on Monday. Hopefully, most people will have received them before AnalysIR is released to backers (circa: 9th September, which allows1 week after the campaign ends to eliminate as many glitches as possible). Remember, to get the full use of AnalysIR you will need the components in Kit A, as a minimum. However, just having an IR receiver is sufficient.(+ of course an Arduino).
So far, everyone has chosen ‘Kit F’, which is probably a good idea. - Regarding the Raspberry Pi ‘stretch goal’, it looks like we may not reach this goal, based on the current trajectory. However, we decided to purchase a Pi with the IGG (aka your) funds released to date & it arrived yesterday. After a lot of ‘wasted’ time trying to get it set up without a display we eventually succeeded. So today we had a go at porting our Arduino code over to the RPi. For the initial attempt, we have decided to use the WiringPi library & we have good success so far. So here is an exported trace image of the first successful NEC IR signal decoded by AnalysIR from a Raspberry Pi.
First successful NEC IR signal decoded by AnalysIR from a Raspberry Pi use CTRL+
On the top you can see the same IR signal recorded directly by AnalysIR at the same time (via 2 different IR receivers – one connected to an Arduino & the other connected to an RPi pin) - We haven’t fully finished with the RPi coding yet & there are some minor glitches, but we are happy with it as a first attempt. At the moment we are using interrupts & are only dumping the information to a terminal screen via a network connection & then manually pasting the output into AnalysIR’s import facility. We have to do some further study to see how we can best get ‘serial’ data from the RPi to the Windows PC. The simple solution is to use a USB serial adapter connected to the Rx/Tx pins of the RPi, but given it already has an Ethernet port we are going to investigate if a more elegant solution is feasible.
That’s all for now……… Next week = Documentation update
Update: Kits, IR Compression, Serial Hack etc….
As we are approaching the last 10 days of the campaign we would like to share the following updates:
● Today we were informed that the kit components were shipped via UPS to us here in Dublin. Hopefully, they will arrive within a few days, which means we should be able to start posting them out over the weekend or early next week.
● We have been busy this week with preparing the Windows installation package and it seems to be going well – so far.
● We also improved the Arduino code and increased the effective RAM available for AnalysIR.
● We have also integrated the IR modulation measurement into the GUI and it works well with the Modulation frequency being updated ‘at least’ once per IR signal. As we mentioned previously, we have not seen an example of IR modulation frequency being measured on an Arduino before, and particularly not simultaneous with IR decoding.
● We have also added support for compression of IR when importing or exporting in Global Cache format.
● Yesterday we had an interesting experience with the Arduino. As we were swapping out one IR receiver and held the signal line in the hand – a signal received by AnalysIR. We inspected the signal and it seemed to be pretty consistent, so it was analysed quickly using excel and it turned out (not surprisingly) to be mains hum which in this part of the world has a frequency of 50Hz (vs 60Hz elsewhere). That then got me thinking about the following hack!
● We then tested sending a series of serial signals from another Arduino into the IR rx pin and voila the serial trace appeared in the display of AnalysIR. We successfully tested up to 38400 BAUD and bit higher. So even though we do not plan to ‘officially’ support serial protocols at this time, it means that you could potentially use AnalysIR as a pseudo Serial analyzer or even a basic digital signal/logic analyzer of sorts. The limit would be somewhere between 40-50kHz, on a 16MHz Arduino. Not bad a hack before release 🙂
● We have recently come across several new IR protocols including:
Denon
Motorola
Samsung
Daewoo
Japanese Code
– To date we have completed all the investigations needed to decode them and add them to AnalysIR. However, we will have to defer this until after the initial release has settled down & we can get reliable source signals to verify against. Once we complete these new signals we will be heading towards an even more comprehensive list of supported protocols.
……stay tuned