My movie playing setup involve Kodi,
+OpenELEC (probably soon to be
+replaced with LibreELEC) and an
+Infocus IN76 video projector. My projector can be controlled via both
+a infrared remote controller, and a RS-232 serial line. The vendor of
+my projector, InFocus, had been
+sensible enough to document the serial protocol in its user manual, so
+it is easily available, and I used it some years ago to write
+a
+small script to control the projector. For a while now, I longed
+for a setup where the projector was controlled by Kodi, for example in
+such a way that when the screen saver went on, the projector was
+turned off, and when the screen saver exited, the projector was turned
+on again.
+
+
A few days ago, with very good help from parts of my family, I
+managed to find a Kodi Add-on for controlling a Epson projector, and
+got in touch with its author to see if we could join forces and make a
+Add-on with support for several projectors. To my pleasure, he was
+positive to the idea, and we set out to add InFocus support to his
+add-on, and make the add-on suitable for the official Kodi add-on
+repository.
+
+
The Add-on is now working (for me, at least), with a few minor
+adjustments. The most important change I do relative to the master
+branch in the github repository is embedding the
+pyserial module in
+the add-on. The long term solution is to make a "script" type
+pyserial module for Kodi, that can be pulled in as a dependency in
+Kodi. But until that in place, I embed it.
+
+
The add-on can be configured to turn on the projector when Kodi
+starts, off when Kodi stops as well as turn the projector off when the
+screensaver start and on when the screesaver stops. It can also be
+told to set the projector source when turning on the projector.
+
+
If this sound interesting to you, check out
+the
+project github repository. Perhaps you can send patches to
+support your projector too? As soon as we find time to wrap up the
+latest changes, it should be available for easy installation using any
+Kodi instance.
+
+
For future improvements, I would like to add projector model
+detection and the ability to adjust the brightness level of the
+projector from within Kodi. We also need to figure out how to handle
+the cooling period of the projector. My projector refuses to turn on
+for 60 seconds after it was turned off. This is not handled well by
+the add-on at the moment.
+
+
As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
+activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
+15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.
+
