ATi Remote Wonder in Linux?
 

I recently got an ATi TV Wonder card w/remote for use in a MythTV box I'm building up. The tuner card works great, and from what I've read on the internet, the TV wonder is supposed to "just work"... it's supposed to show up as a HID in newer 2.6 kernels and thus mimic a mouse and keyboard.

Unfortunately I'm getting nothing at all from my Remote Wonder. Nada.

I've tried plugging in mutliple USB mice and keyboards and my system has no trouble accepting input from multiple ones at the same time, so I don't believe that's the problem.

dmesg shows that the ati_remote module loads up and initializes properly when I plug in the RF receiver.

However, I get nothing at all from the remote.

As other people on the internet have had seemingly zero trouble at all getting their Remote Wonders to work, I'm curious whether I've got a bum transmitter, or if I'm just doing something wrong with the configuration. I'd rather not have to install windows on the box just to verify that my hardware actually works...

Anybody else gotten one of these to work before in Linux?

I don't know anything about this particular piece of hardware, but I know a litle about device drivers, and I can speculate as well as anybody.

If dmesg tells you it sees the IR receiver, that's a good sign that everything's set up right about the card itself. You might check the batteries in the remote? Because it does sound like an issue somewhere between the remote and the receiver.

I have a universal "learning" remote that reads other remote's IR patterns so it can pretend to be that remote. I've used that to test remotes before--if my u-remote can read them, I know that's not where my problem is. Maybe you could find one of those?

Well this is an RF remote -- no IR. And it's a USB receiver, not a PCI card. It's so frustrating, though, to see ati_remote listed quite clearly under /proc/bus/input

As you can see, the ATI controller is being recognized as mouse1 and kbd, with the PS/2 keyboard and mouse being regognized as mouse0 and kbd. The /dev/input/mice device node should be picking up on both the mouse interfaces, and naturally the kbd interface should be recognized as a keyboard.

Supremely frustrating, because there's no real way to debug this -- I mean, how do you debug whether the remote is transmitting a valid RF signal? How do you debug whether the receiver is even "hearing" anything?

I hate problems like this.

Have you tried checking for input with evtest? My myth box has been down for a bit or I'd be more help.

I checked with xev and it isn't capturing anything...does evtest dig deeper than xev?

Yes. xev is sort of a superset X version of showkey. evtest watches the specific device. If you get something with evtest you know the hardware is okay. If not, it probably isn't or the driver isn't playing nicely.

Well I managed to locate evtest (its in the lineakd package), and lo and behold...looks like the receiver is working quite nicely, but not receiving a single thing the transmitter is sending.

While I'm happy to have a new debugging tool...I'm disappointed that this most likely means that my remote is busted...

Sorry, it's been awhile since I last debugged these things. I was thinking it arrived with 2.6.5 & the gang. Must get my box back in shape...

You tried a hammer already?