Raspbmc Hyperion On/Off

I’ve just finished making the surround for my TV after testing it all with sticky tape 🙂 it’s looks awesome.

But the first question I was asked “How do I turn it off?”, Apparently the answer of “You don’t” wasn’t the right one. So a little searching brought me to a fellow blog post http://blog.nadnerb.co.uk/?p=11 which takes you through setting up a remote button in xbmc to disable the service.
While I’d be happy with the remote button option, turning the entire service on and off doesn’t sit well with me, what if I want to set mood lighting from my phone 🙂

So I had a little play with hyperion-remote and thought yeah I can script that. So below is my quick and dirty alternative to disabling the service.

First connect to the PI and create a new file (I called it hyperion_toggle_black.sh)
nano -w hyperion_toggle_black.sh

#!/bin/bash
priority=222

hyper_check=`hyperion-remote -l | grep -i ""priority" : $priority"`
echo $hyper_check
if [ -z "$hyper_check" ]
then
   hyperion-remote -p $priority -c black
else
   hyperion-remote -p $priority -x
fi
exit 0

Next make the script executable
chmod +x hyperion_toggle_black.sh
Now you can test it using ./hyperion_toggle_black.sh
Run it a few times and see that the LED’s go on and off.
The important part of this is the priority, XBMC seems to use a priority of 1000, so any number lower should be great. The android app and hyperion-remote seems to default to 50 or 100. Since I want these to still work I need a value higher than these. 222 should be good, but your free to change it if you like. If for example you want a complete off, setting it to 0 or 1 should be above everything else.
This script basically gives hyperion another job at priority 222 to set all the LED’s black, if there is no current priority 222, and clears priority 222 if it already exists. hence the toggle. On the plus side this wont require root privileges to start/stop the service.
Now you can edit the remote keymap file
nano -w /home/pi/.xbmc/userdata/keymaps/remote.xml
Because I’m using an LG TV and the symlink seems fairly basic, I’m limited to what buttons I can assign. I’ve already previously added a ‘Home’ button to my pause, So I’ve decided to change this slightly by using the pause button to trigger the script while it’s already on the Home screen.
Adding the line  lines
<pause>XBMC.System.Exec(“/home/pi/hyperion_toggle_black.sh”)</pause>
Within the Home>Remote section, but keeping the Global>Remote as
<pause>XBMC.ActivateWindow(Home)</pause>
This took a little playing around to work out which buttons I can use, the blog post at http://forum.osmc.tv/showthread.php?tid=6978 gave me the debug and tail commands to use.

Reboot the PI and viola. There’s about a 1 second delay between pressing the button and the LED’s going off/on, but I can live with that for now.

I didn’t need the XBMC notifications like the other blog post, but if this is something you want, you can mash my script to his and get your own thing 🙂

Notes:
I’m not entirely sure if turning the LED’s Black actually turns them off (i.e. no power) so I may in the future expand it with maybe a relay to control the actual power to the LED’s, but this would break the priority thing unless I put in some checks and run the script in the background.
I could also then add a push button to the PI’s GPIO triggering the on/off script at more of a physical level, hey I could even add a few buttons to be able to select an effect. but for now I’m happy to do all of that via my phone, and just have a priority function for XBMC.

One thought on “Raspbmc Hyperion On/Off”

  1. Hi,
    Sorry I'm not getting alerts about comments, will have to check why.
    I'm just using the default twentyfifteen theme, it's supposed to be better for mobile than twentyfourteen. I haven't made any customisations on this yet.

    Reply

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