Flirc is excited to announce the launch of IR Learning for the Skip 1s remote control. You can now incorporate any IR remote control into your media flow, regardless of whether it is in our library or not. And the process should be extremely easy.

Over time, we hope to make these newly learned remotes available to our entire community. Every time the Skip 1s library expands, life gets a little easier for the whole Flirc community!

Teaching the Skip 1s New Tricks

For a quick tutorial on how to record your remote, watch the video below.

Firmware Updates

Apart from the additional ability to record, we have identified further performance and stability improvements that should enhance usability and improve battery life. We are excited about these recent improvements.

Other Improvements

This update brings several other quality-of-life improvements, including improved performance, better space and animation management and other bug fixes. Even if you are all set with existing remotes, we’ll highly encourage everyone to update to experience these added benefits.

Full Changelog

• New – IR Learning Wizard Addition
• Improved – Performance on Mac
• Fixed – Activity Animation with Large Config
• Fixed – Add Activity Highlight Placement
• Fixed – Manual Assignment on Linux Resulted in Duplicates
• Fixed – Recording Occasionally Showing Incorrect Icon
• Fixed – Remote Manager Tools Icons in Dark Mode
• Fixed – Screen Resolution in Compact Mode Bug
• Fixed – Wizard Dropdown Alphabetical Ordering
• Firmware – Ability to Record Remotes
• Firmware – Stability, Performance, Battery Improvements

What’s Next

Over the next few days, we will be releasing a new release candidate for further testing, which is the most significant performance overhaul of our application. We expect this release to go live in 2 weeks. Our immediate focus will now be:

GUI

• Wizard Overhaul and Improvements
• Fixing multi-state Buttons (mute on / mute off, play, pause, etc)
• Misc Bug Fixes

Firmware

• Smart Device Switching
• Support for Multi-State Buttons

We have faced a number of significant technical challenges this year that have set us back a bit on schedule. We couldn’t work on some of these firmware features until we had learning working to meet our expectations, and made some under-the-hood progress. Overall, we are excited about our current position, and I’m confident that customers will visually see and feel the differences that are being released and are imminent. Thanks for everyone’s continued support.

To Celebrate

To celebrate this huge milestone, we made a fun video we thought you would enjoy. Check it out and share!

We are excited to announce that Flirc’s legendary collection of silent, passively cooled Pi cases will be expanded once again to support the Raspberry Pi 5. In fact, pre-orders for the Flirc Raspberry Pi 5 case are already available at Flirc.tv.

If you haven’t heard the news already, the Pi Foundation is releasing a newer, far more powerful Raspberry Pi 5. You can find a full specs rundown of the Pi 5 with a focus on media center issues over on LibreELEC’s site. And if you’d like a video review of the Pi 5’s abilities, thermal issues, and more, check out the video by Jeff Geerling, a friend of the site.

Preliminary tests of the new Pi 5 board show that the new Flirc case looks great, ensuring your Raspberry Pi 5 runs at peak efficiency at all times without the annoying whir of a fan.

With that said, what you will not find available for pre-order yet is a Kodi edition of the Flirc Raspberry Pi 5 case. That’s because we need your help. Samfisher, from the Kodi Foundation, has put together a series of awesome new designs for the case, and we need help picking the best one.

You can vote for your favorites over at the Kodi forum. Be sure to vote to vote, and let us know your thoughts on the new designs in the comments! Currently, boxes 4, 5, and 6 are the top voted boxes, so we’ve created some 3D renders to give you an idea of how awesome they look!

It’s with great excitement to finally announce a partnership that was years in the making. Felix, the creator of Remote Buddy, and I have been working for over a year on an extensive collaboration. While I give him the majority of the credit for the bigger piece of the collaboration, I am nevertheless honored to have worked with him.

Remote Buddy 2.0 is available for download, and packs a punch of features. It’s not only powerful, extensive, but it’s beautiful.

Exclusive Features

Remote Buddy 2.0 is built on an incredible architecture, with support for a number of receivers, and a number of remotes. But being the creators of each, gave us the unique opportunity to work on features together not found anywhere else. Flirc and Remote Buddy work together in concert and with incredible integration and advanced features.

How It Works

Flirc has a number of USB interfaces. The normal ones you are already familiar with. The pairing interface, and the HID (keyboard/misc) interfaces. Alongside this interface sits the new remote buddy interface, and it’s been there since version v4.6.0 of the flirc firmware. It’s been shipping for 9 months, and is already enabled on all existing and new devices. When the remote buddy interface is active, the HID interface is not, so only one interface is supported at a time. The Flirc GUI will not interrupt Remote Buddy’s operation, and allows easy upgrades without the need to quit Remote Buddy.

Lowest Latency

Since most post processing is done through remote buddy, Flirc passes up the data as quickly as possible for the lowest latency and best experience on the market.

Beta Features

New to Remote Buddy and Flirc is a new feature for customizable wake support. You can pair a single apple remote, a range of apple remotes, or a unique key from any remote to wake up a computer From S0/S1/S3 sleep states.

To try this out, grab the latest beta firmware from the forums here. Remember to give us feedback.

Upcoming Features

We’re already hard at work on adding more new features, but would also love to hear your ideas. Leave a comment here or through the forums, or send Felix an email.

Discounted Flirc with Valid Remote Buddy 2.0 License

We worked hard to create the best IR receiver for Remote Buddy. And we want as many people as possible to enjoy the level of detail, functionality and integration we’ve achieved.

So we’re making an offer so good it’d be financially stupid to pick a different, inferior product:

Remote Buddy users with a license valid for version 2.0 will be able to purchase one Flirc for only $9.95 (excluding shipping). This offer will not expire and only be valid through the flirc.tv store.

Felix and I are working together to make this offer available through a new Benefits page that will roll out as soon as possible.

Should you have eagerly purchased a Flirc in advance from our store, around the time of this announcement, please get in touch and we’ll work together to extend the discount to you.

It is with great excitement that alongside the Raspberry Pi 4’s release today, we are announcing two brand new Raspberry Pi cases to accommodate all the changes of this amazing new hardware.

We’ve been hard at work and have started high volume manufacturing of a brand new case. We kept all the details that made the original case one of the top selling raspberry pi cases, and along side our own case, we’re releasing a newly designed and limited edition Kodi case, for the same exact price.

We expect to ship both in roughly 3-4 weeks. Pre-order now for special pricing and save 30%.

Grab em’ here: Kodi Raspberry Pi 4 Case and Raspberry Pi4 Case

Come visit our booth at the Bay Area Maker Faire. Were previewing some unreleased products and we love chatting.

A ways to go, this is the bring up board. But it’s up and running, and I’ll be excited to release it. Code name Rogue1.

Any correct guesses, and you’ll get one for free.

Big Developments

Was a great couple of weeks. I’ve been working hard on some major efforts and they are all starting to come to fruition.  I’ll share some of the more exciting news.

New Flirc Raspberry Pi Case

I know we don’t have a landing page for the new case design yet, but all new orders of the case will be of the new design. Some big improvements:

• New manufacturing process, it’s gorgeous, perfect surface
• SD Card now accessible on the PI3
• Heat Slug now properly covering 100% of the Pi3 CPU
• Overall Better

Unfortunately hit a snag with the talented artist who helps with design material for my website. So I’ve fallen behind making a new landing page. It’s coming.

Harmony Support

Logitech is an important partner, a lot of users have logitech remotes. So we’re adding some new profiles to the Logitech line specifically for flirc. Windows Media Center, and Shield. What this means, is if you have Windows Media Center, and a Shield, add these devices to your harmony, and it’ll work out of the box without any additional software or pairing. What’s the difference between Microsoft WMCE and Flirc WMCE? Flirc WMCE uses the flirc profile, and is going to work much better than the Microsoft protocol which is chaotic, and different for every MS WMCE remote.

On top of those profiles, we also added the ‘.’ (period). Something that was requested.

The harmony profiles will go live on Monday.

Firmware Updates

Holy shit where to begin. Some major happenings. I’ll start with Flirc Gen1.

Gen1

I have made an update to the Flirc Generation 1 hardware that allows software to tell the difference between Streacom Edition Flircs and regular Flircs. This was so overdue, it’s sad. Now, the GUI can tell the difference between the hardware, and users can now finally program the power button with the GUI.

Gen2

• new hashing algorithm with 10x perf
• new logging output architecture
• ability to log raw timing ir waveforms
• minor algorithm improvments and bug fixes
• ability to disable/enable built in rom tables
• fixed issue which didn’t detect re-pressing
• adding new Shield and WMCE Flirc profiles
• updates to built in kodi profile
• many bug fixes and architecture improvements

GUI Updates

Improvements to the GUI were also published which include:

• advanced window for gen2 updates and improvments
• new streacom controller for recording power off
• New device log window to show the raw timing of IR signals.

One of the biggest updates was to the GUI which allows us to read the device log and enable the ability to print out raw timing wave forms of the IR signals. This is going to be great. Rather than buying a bunch of remotes, users will be able to capture the waveform, save to a text file and send to me. And in the near future, I’ll be able to load these files onto a flirc, and ‘playback’ exactly what your flirc saw. All made possible to the amazing software architecture in the new flirc as well as the new more powerful arm processor.

App Pad

App Pad is an application that will hopefully be released in a couple of weeks. Wont say much until the big reveal, but it’s going to be one of the greatest companions HTPC owners could ask for. And it’ll be completely free. Stay tuned.

Remote IR Protocol

I will be publicly releasing the Flirc IR spec shortly. I’m working on converting this into an open doc.

IR Transmit Support

Working on this now, it’ll be in the next major release

SDK

Long overdue and in progress

Flirc Kodi Case

Because we released a new version of our raspberry pi case, and boy is it awesome, we’re discounting the kodi cases since they are based on the original design. Get em while you can.

It is with great pleasure that I get to announce the addition of a new joint venture with one of the most important players in the media center industry, Kodi. We began talking in 2012 after the launch of my first product, Flirc. After they wrote an article about flirc, my relationship with the board members soon strengthened as I was praised for one of the best accessories for their media center software. Their praise was received with great honor, I made flirc specifically for Kodi, and to receive that feedback from the team itself was incredible after years of hard work.

We have built a great relationship with the team, and the Kodi Raspberry Pi Case was a natural step in our growing relationship together. It’s with great excitement to announce a limited edition Kodi Raspberry Pi Case, which is available today from our store, and customers outside the US can get theirs at our partner, The Pi Hut located in the UK.

Flirc USB will also be on sale for 25% off only through our site to celebrate the launch. I look forward to many more ventures with Kodi. Please check out their full press release and don’t forget to watch the great video that Nate put together.

Big thanks to Nate, Franz, and Martijn for their help, patience, and collaboration over the past 6 months in nailing this to perfection. It was a pleasure working with them.

Kodi is the registered trademark of the XBMC foundation and Flirc was granted permission to use their logo.

New Store

I’ll start out with the juicy stuff. If you head over to the main flirc website, the buy link has been replaced with ‘store‘. It’s no coincidence that flirc has been extremely popular in the raspberry pi community. So it only made sense to help customers by giving them the convenience of purchasing the raspberry pi and it’s accessories at flirc. However, if purchased together, there is a 4.00 savings off the order. That’s awesome!

New Support Site

I’ve also added a new support website. I’ve decided to go with zendesk which will be populated with as much information as possible to help solve common issues. If you had recently emailed me in the past, my response time was hit or miss. As Flirc has grown, so has my responsibilities. I do this on the side of a full time job, and I’m a new father. It’s getting extremely tough, so I’m redirecting support questions to a knowledge base which will most likely answer your question. If not, there are the forums, and then me. I’ve been pretty active on the forums, but I can’t keep up with the sheer volume of emails that hit my inbox. Nearly all of them are easily answered somewhere on the site. I’m just making them easier to find.

New Products

Okay, so the theme for today’s post is the raspberry pi. I’ve got some exciting stuff coming out for that, it’s going to make some waves. More updates soon.

New Bootloader

I finished a new bootloader that will be shipping on newly shipped devices, more details on why tomorrow.