My movie playing setup involve Kodi,
OpenELEC (probably soon to be
replaced with LibreELEC) and an
Infocus IN76 video projector. My projector can be controlled via both
a infrared remote controller, and a RS-232 serial line. The vendor of
my projector, InFocus, had been
sensible enough to document the serial protocol in its user manual, so
it is easily available, and I used it some years ago to write
a
small script to control the projector. For a while now, I longed
for a setup where the projector was controlled by Kodi, for example in
such a way that when the screen saver went on, the projector was
turned off, and when the screen saver exited, the projector was turned
on again.
A few days ago, with very good help from parts of my family, I
managed to find a Kodi Add-on for controlling a Epson projector, and
got in touch with its author to see if we could join forces and make a
Add-on with support for several projectors. To my pleasure, he was
positive to the idea, and we set out to add InFocus support to his
add-on, and make the add-on suitable for the official Kodi add-on
repository.
The Add-on is now working (for me, at least), with a few minor
adjustments. The most important change I do relative to the master
branch in the github repository is embedding the
pyserial module in
the add-on. The long term solution is to make a "script" type
pyserial module for Kodi, that can be pulled in as a dependency in
Kodi. But until that in place, I embed it.
The add-on can be configured to turn on the projector when Kodi
starts, off when Kodi stops as well as turn the projector off when the
screensaver start and on when the screesaver stops. It can also be
told to set the projector source when turning on the projector.
If this sound interesting to you, check out
the
project github repository. Perhaps you can send patches to
support your projector too? As soon as we find time to wrap up the
latest changes, it should be available for easy installation using any
Kodi instance.
For future improvements, I would like to add projector model
detection and the ability to adjust the brightness level of the
projector from within Kodi. We also need to figure out how to handle
the cooling period of the projector. My projector refuses to turn on
for 60 seconds after it was turned off. This is not handled well by
the add-on at the moment.
As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.
