So you bought one of these remotes on ebay?

And you plugged it into your Linux box, and it doesn’t work? This page can probably help.

First off, here’s a description of the device: It’s a remote that comes with a USB receiver which will report itself to be a HID device with a VendorId:ProductId of 3351:3715. It can function as a USB keyboard and a USB mouse—the toggle button on the remote switches between the two uses. In “mouse” mode, the left mouse button supposedly is “back” and the right button is “ok”. The directional controls move the mouse. The device’s HID data is scattered over two interfaces (in the USB sense), each of which carries a HID descriptor and has one endpoint. Here’s one important piece of information: The device will not talk unless both endpoints have been opened. So much for the hardware description. Now how do you get this thing to work?

Out of the Box

When you plug it into a Linux system (as of 2.6.19.1), it does not work out of the box. It gets recognized as a mouse and a keyboard. For some reason, Linux opens only one endpoint, leaving the other as a user HID device (/dev/usb/hiddevN), and as mentioned above, the receiver will thus refuse to talk.

What to do

First, tell the kernel to ignore the device. We’ll talk to it via libusb. Go into drivers/hid/usbhid/hid-quirks.c (or drivers/usb/input/hid-core.c in older versions of Linux) and add a line

{ 0x3351, 0x3715, HID_QUIRK_IGNORE },

to the hid_blacklist. Recompile the module (or the whole kernel).

Next, get a thread-safe version of the libhid Python binding. I hacked thread safety into it, so it might take a while for the change to migrate upstream. I might update this page as this happens. For the time being, you may download a suitable set of Debian packages.

Finally, download and install my custom LIRC server. For now, the download directory also contains a file hidwrap.py that should be part of libhid-python, but while it still isn’t, install it to /usr/lib/pyton2.N/site-packages/hid (with appropriate permissions). Then run

su -c python setup.py install

in the package’s root. Next, run

su -c lircd-xpc -n

If you run irw or any lircd client, you should see button presses coming in. Once this works, you may install the init script from the initscript directory and set up a symlink to start lircd-xpc automatically.

NOTE: You do not need the actual LIRC daemon. You actually should not have it running. This is a replacement specifically for this remote. Why? Well, I found it easier to rewrite the relevant parts of lircd in python than to figure out how to interface to its C code. Maybe someone with more time than me will actually tie this into the LIRC framework.