Long Presses and Macros Released

By far the coolest update for flirc, was today. Everyone’s flircs just got a lot cooler. Today, I’m happy to announce the addition of long presses and macros. Two features that I’ve been planning on for quite some time, and they are definitely worth the wait.

Macros

Macros allow you to assign more than one function to a single remote control button. Basically, I can have a string of text or a bunch of commands, etc, all execute when I press a single button on my remote. That’s now possible with todays firmware. There is currently no limit on the amount of buttons, but you might see some issues with anything more than 16. We can always change that, the limit is artificial right now.

Long Presses

Some of my favorite remotes don’t have a lot of buttons. Specifically, the apple remote. This update will allow you to assign a second function on any remote control button if you hold it down for more than half a second. Tapping on the button as normal will do the first function, holding it for half a second will not send out the first function, but send out the second.

Long Presses + Macros

You can also combine the two features. Press a button and have a single action, press and hold that same button, and do a macro. Check out the short demo video

Worthy Notes

1. There is currently no GUI support for these two features. This is going to be quite tricky to do, so although the software and API’s are all well thought out, I’ll need a bit of time before these can be standard in the GUI. For now, you’ll need the command line utility, and documentation on how to do these features can be found in the current manual.
2. To do a long press, you have to hold down the button for half a second, this is currently hard coded, might change this in the future
3. Macros keys are all sent out as soon as possible, may update this so users can change these timings
4. Deleting a key that has macros or long press functionality will delete every single key associated with that remote control button.

Other Updates

Plugin Support

One of the coolest silently released features was plugin support. All thanks to Yawor who did all the work. He did a fantastic job, and has posted a few items on the forums. This will be formalized into the release soon, and more documentation will be created. Basically, this allows you to create an SVG and XML file, and the graphics and functionality will be dynamically loaded into the GUI. Users will be able to share theirs to help other setup unique setups.

General GUI Improvements

Also thanks to Yawor, a lot of the important GUI items have been re-written to be a bit more dynamic and cleaned up a lot of issues. I’m in debt for his help, he’s a fantastic engineer.

Hosting Updates

I’m giving up on hosting packages. It’s a pain in the ass and took a lot of time and work. I found packagecloud and they take a lot of the work out all the security related issues. If you have the old repo in your distro, make sure you remove that and install the new ones. You can find instructions on the downloads page.

Build Updates

I’ve migrated all the build and release to travis, which although a bumpy start, was absolutely the right thing to do. It’s not a great idea to do build releases on a development machine for many reasons, but I held all the tools on my laptop. No other employee or partner could do a release without me, that’s no longer the case.

SDK Fallen Behind

Because we have everything built on Travis now, the SDK library build and release tools have fallen behind. I should have these built into travis by next week or shortly after.

Raspberry Pi Version Behind

Not quite sure how to do pi release yet on travis, so those have fallen behind. I’ll manually update these versions soon.

Happy Holidays

A very happy holidays and a happy and healthy new years to everyone. Feel free to leave comments, shoot me emails, or start forum discussions.

I just re-installed the dymo software recently. Maybe I didn’t notice the install package question, but after rebooting, I got a funny icon on my menubar called Demo Label Web Service. I searched around and couldn’t find out how to remove this since it didn’t show up under the startup services in user accounts.

So after searching a bit, I found the culprit and thought others would find this useful. Open a terminal and type the following:

sudo rm /Library/LaunchAgents/com.dymo.dls.webservice.plist

The app is still on your computer, however, it won’t automatically run after every reboot. Completely fucking obnoxious that they don’t allow you to disable that anywhere.