JP1 Remotes

Hi!

I have tables for 5-digit extended function codes for several devices on an URC 7950. Is there any place to share that sort of information? Or is mapping the EFCs to the actual functions a solved problem?

I'm asking because this information is useful for people that (yet) don't have a cable to connect the remote to the PC. With a cable, it's of course not so important.

- Dirk

dirkt wrote:I have tables for 5-digit extended function codes for several devices on an URC 7950. Is there any place to share that sort of information?

To answer my own question, "File section/Miscellanous/Code Lists" has files with such tables (though the newest is two years old). Which I only found out after systematically going through the complete file section :-(. Maybe changing the name of the section to
something like "EFC Code Lists" would make this easier?

I uploaded the six tables I had. I put category and code in front, so they'll get sorted correctly. One upload got duplicated because of trouble with the internet connection, however, and I don't know how to delete it...

dirkt wrote:Or is mapping the EFCs to the actual functions a solved problem?

The answer seems to be "sort of". I found the Excel sheets to convert 3-digit EFCs to one byte and 5-digit EFCs to two bytes. (Again, I didn't expect to find this information under "Spreadsheets") But that's still only the internal representation, one needs to know the protocol to interpret that representation. For example, for the "Japanese" protocol that Pioneer uses, one has to revert and negate the bits in one byte, and use the other byte as an index into a list. I haven't figured out how the Panasonic "Mix" code works, yet...

dirkt wrote:I'm asking because this information is useful for people that (yet) don't have a cable to connect the remote to the PC.

So it looks like it's quite possible to extract EFCs from the device upgrade files. Which would be really helpful for users without a JP1 cable; maybe one should advertise this fact more prominently.

- Dirk

It's rare for us to deal in code lists like this, hence the age of the data in that folder. Most people who gets lists like this use them to build an upgrade which they then load into the appropriate folder for upgrades.

The Robman wrote:Most people who gets lists like this use them to build an upgrade which they then load into the appropriate folder for upgrades.

The tables contain more EFCs (including several choices for one function, sometimes contradictory) than would fit in a single device upgrade (which, if I understood it correctly, is a particular assignment of URC keys to functions), so I'd thought it would be better to share them as they are. I guess they come from several models that all partly work with that particular code.

The intention is mostly to document possible EFCs in case people have to go hunting for missing functions. Or how is that kind of information handled normally?

Although it is possible that there are more functions than can be assigned to buttons in an upgrade, every function you have can still be "assigned" for storage or reference in the device upgrade file. Those which cannot be assigned to a button due to a lack of buttons are still stored and available for use or reference in the device upgrade KM or RM file.

Actually Rob has many EFC lists on this site that come straight from UEI. But as Rob said, this is an outdated way to do it as the upgrade files are more useful and comprehesive. Most everyone who makes upgrades won't go to the trouble of making a separate EFC list anyway. So even if you make one out of the goodness of your heart, probably no one else will.

I understand the need to make EFC lists more accessible to novices. Since RM/KM are the latest and greatest tools to view these lists, what makes the most sense to me would be to make installing these tools much simpler, so novices could get upgrade files and then easily open them in the appropriate viewer, much like you get acrobat to read pdf files.

I imagine this is the typical scenario for a non-JP1er hunting for codes:
- Search the device upgrade section (so far so good)
- Without reading the beginner threads, opens said files in notepad and finds them incomprehensible
- With a little more research they determine they need KM
- They download KM, but they don't have excel and if they do, macros are blocked and they don't know how to unblock them
- They give up and download RM
- It won't run because they don't have Java
- They either find and install the Java VM or get the exe version of RM
- They're on linux so the exe doesn't work
- They get the java version working but it can find the RDF files
- They download the RDF files
- Now it can't find the image files
- They download the image files
- They finally get RM working and find their code

Now that's worst case, but I bet it's pretty common. A nice installer that included all the little pieces would have them in business by step 3, which is very reasonable. I've actually tried and failed to write an installer, but I don't have the skills to write it to go fetch all the latest files from the web.