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.
-
