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:

• Sky
• Sky+ (This has the full set of buttons as found on the 'sky navigator' keypad.)

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:

• The numbers basically seem to be time units.
• The first number is the length of the first 'on' pulse, the second the length of the first 'off' pulse and so on.
• The numbers have normally come from a slightly unreliable sampling process, so expect a large degree of 'jitter' in the figures.
• "On" pulses seem to be longer than "off" pulses - my theory is this is something to do with the electrical properties of the receiver, but I'm not sure.

What I did

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

Last update: 11th Dec 2005