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.

Head on over to the flirc store and enjoy discounts up to 50% off today and through next week. Happy Holidays!

Cases came in and we’ve started shipping them Monday. Orders are flying out, and customers should start getting email notifications with tracking.

Kodi cases are shipping to us this Friday, and will go out as soon as they arrive. Because both cases are so different, their manufacturing processes are also distinctly different. One had to be done before the other.

Orders were supposed to start shipping out about a week ago. However, as soon as I got the first units back, I did a lot of thermal testing.

This new pi runs hot. I started testing with various benchmark scripts, python, etc. But results were generally inconsistent across tests. Much depended on the initial starting conditions. Should the pi have started cooler, I’d see much different results than if I had it running idle. If I just finished a test, results were different as well.

I tried other tests and settled on cpuburn-arm.

Results were consistent. I felt like I saw the most consistent and highest power draw. Which means we could theoretically get temp as quickly as possible.

Without any case, in 26-27C ambient, I got a naked raspberry pi to nearly 90C in 5-10 minutes. Okay great. Now with the Flirc case, I get it to 80C in 25 minutes. I saw the temp hang around 80C +/- 2C for 30 minutes. Seems like we hit steady state, but I think we can do better.

So we started studying the design, the gap, and the thermal material, and simulated. I ordered some new thermal pads and did some more tests that looked great. I got some arctic cool pads off amazon with a much higher thermal conductivity, and started testing.

In my lab/warehouse 26-27C which is really hot, it took 90 minutes of cpu burn before it got to 80C. Ambient matters. I ran another test on Monday, where it was 24-25C, and in 3 hours, it never went above 77C.

But let’s talk about something important. cpuburn is meant to burn as much power as possible, it’s not realistic of any situation. Yes, cpu utilization could get up to 100%, but that doesn’t mean the processor is going to burn the same power. Cpuburn is meant to try and draw the most power. Depending on the software that’s running, power will not only be different, but it will be dynamic. Even running cpuburn, on stopping, I saw a 1C drop every second. So in actuality, a real load alleviates the stress on the cpu, allowing it breathing time to cool.

I’m confident in the case and the new pad. Confident in saying that any strenuous situation will be fine without the need for active cooling or worrying about overheating.

I got in touch with arctic directly, and were shipping with their pads.

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