The Humax remote stopped working, and I was just about to throw it away and buy another when I thought I would google the problem. Who would have thought that you can reboot a remote control?
Maybe, you guys all knew that, but it surprised me. :)
It doesn't totally surprise me, but it's a bit sad. It should be possible to make a remote control without any operating system complex enough to lock up. What is the name for a system all of whose possible states are defined? That is surely a reasonable ambition for a remote control?
Yes, there was certainly a chip back in the '90s (it might have been called Viper) where every combination had been thoroughly tested and it was known that there were no hardware design faults. I'm sure such chips must exist today and, if so, the simple code required for something like a remote should also be able to be exhaustively tested (automated testing) and provide a system that cannot fault or lock up - ignoring hardware failure.
Probably the same mistake that I made. The Humax control has two buttons at the top to select whether to control a TV or the PVR.
If you're trying to control the PVR, maybe you accidentally pressed the TV button!
Indeed, removing the batteries will cause a reset and resolve the problem
But a remote is a battery operated device and electronics have a limit to how low a power supply can go.
And brownout protection simply stops them until you replace the battery.
I recall the Viper chip and how the Australian government too the various parties to court over claims made.
You will often find ARM processors in safety critical systems but these will generally be multiprocessor in a control / safety check roles. That way bugs become less of an issue too.
with my freesat Humax I always think my remote is broken until I notice it has to be on the right setting to work the unit and not the tv etc....
I notice that a remote I have has a header inside it, and apparently it can be made to be used on several different models by connecting it to a computer and changing the software. I'm not surprised in the slightest, but normally the failure mode is more basic, silly rubber conductive gunk blocking the buttons operation, or shorting it out, Just get a simple light detector and see if the led is pulsing, assuming it has not also got a visible one of course. Brian
Yes - and easy trap for the unwary!
I've got a couple of RCs that no longer work at all, and also a couple where only some of the buttons work.
One way of finding out if an RC is actually transmitting a signal is to hold it close to a radio with a ferrite rod aerial, and tuned to a quiet spot on the long wave. If the RC is transmitting, you will hear a 'burpity-burp' noise when you press the a button.
How does that detect a failure of an infrared transmitter?
It won't tell you if the actual LED has failed (which is unlikely), but it will give you pretty good confidence that the rest is OK. As Brian has said, for the LED, some digital cameras might show you it's flashing (even if it's not visible to the human eye).
my fav dodge ....
Robin formulated the question :
It doesn't, it will detect a radio remote control's operation. For IR, point it at a camera, or camera phone and look at the resultant picture.
you don't get any noise...try it
by taking the batteries out?
I have to do that frequently with all of mine
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A convenience, that applies to our satellite box but I'm not sure about its Human predecessor, is an LED on the target equipment that flashes when it receives an IR signal. It is useful to distinguish a remote control failure from the satellite box itself locking up, which latter is annoyingly common.
Can old people press the buttons really hard if the batteries are failing?
A webcam or a smartphone cam, can see the 940nm light from the remote.
Here, I shot webcam video, so I'd catch it blipping, then cropped down to just the remote front portion.
I took the batteries out, but that didn't work. What it needed was to hold three buttons down for several seconds. I then needed to reprogramme it with the code for our TV.
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