Re: Suggestions for reporting remote control button presses to userland

["Jared D. McNeill" <jmcneill%invisible.ca@localhost>]

Greg Troxel wrote:
>   I have a 24-button IR remote control here that I want to use with
>   NetBSD. My driver decodes the key presses, but I don't know how to
>   deliver them to userland. wskbd seems a bit heavy, and even if there
>   was an easier way I'm not sure how I would represent a button named
>   eg. "DVD menu" or "Guide" with wskbd.
>
> I think the hard part is coming up with a representation that can work
> sensibly with many remote controls.  I don't know if that world has
> standard codes or names.
>
> You could have a character device that returns some sort of keycodes.
> If you could fit the same extended keycodes (perhaps some sort of UTF-8
> for keyboards ?) into wskbd, that would seem natural, especially if by
> default you can mark this keyboard not to get merged into wsmux0.

Yeah, having them report as X keycodes would be nice. A quick hack would 
be to attach com(4) to the driver and make userland responsible for 
decoding the keycodes I suppose..

>   I've hooked the volume buttons into pmf for volume control, but what
>   about the remaining 22 buttons?
>
> It would be nice to make the volume buttons also available by the same
> interface the rest are.  Depending on what one is doing, the uniformity
> would help.

Yeah, eventually I will go that route. Just testing for now :)

Cheers,
Jared