Controlling Sky or Sky+ from your PC

Background

I've been experimenting with mythtv looking towards incorporating my Sky and SkyPlus boxes into my PVR setup. These boxes can be controlled via infrared, but more interestingly they can also be controlled by their second RF output ('RF2') - this is the system that remote 'magic eyes' use.

My aim is to develop a very small USB box to be able to control my sky and sky-plus boxes via the RF2 port. This page lists various interesting things I found whilst trying to do this. I could have made my life easy and used a parallel port or serial port to control the boxes instead, but that seemed a bit old fashioned (and one of my PCs doesn't have parellel/serial ports).

LIRC

A few people control their sky boxes from LIRC using a variety of IR 'dongles'.

If you want to do this, here's a few config files I've picked up:

There's also an article that was pointed out to me on IR codes.

Controlling a Sky+ box via RF2

This is the difficult one. There's not much info about. Lacking a proper oscilloscope to study the waveforms, I started from the info in the newsgroup thread and the Sky+ LIRC configuration. Unfortunately the numbers are pretty difficult to make sense of, so I passed them through a custom perl script. Useful things to know about the LIRC configuration data:

So, taking all this into account, my perl script what I believe are the correct waveforms to start injecting into the Sky+ RF2 port.

What I did

See the other links from the index page to see my solution.

Last update: 11th Dec 2005


Joseph Heenan, joseph@heenan.me.uk