IR blaster functionality

[agent_kith]

Have just got to have a bit of a play with this and am having trouble with the device. Whenever I try an 'irsend' I get an error saying hardware does not support sending. I am pretty sure that it is related to the 'device' definition. 

If I use the snakeoil GUI, under the ALSA config I can see that there is a device ALC283 Analog (hw:0,0)- this is the onboard audio for my NUC. Tried all variations of the name as a 'device' when starting lirc but still get the unable to send error.

I found that 'aplay -l' & 'arecord -l' and 'cat /proc/asound/cards' will list the audio devices on your system. Interestingly aplay & arecord report no soundcards found !

david@NUC:/etc/lirc$ aplay -l
aplay: device_list:270: no soundcards found...

david@NUC:/etc/lirc$ arecord -l
arecord: device_list:270: no soundcards found..

but detected here

david@NUC:/etc/lirc$ cat /proc/asound/cards
 0 [PCH            ]: HDA-Intel - HDA Intel PCH                             <<-------------
                      HDA Intel PCH at 0xd0710000 irq 90
 1 [DAC            ]: USB-Audio - USB Audio DAC
                      Burr-Brown from TI USB Audio DAC at usb-0000:00:14.0-2, full speed

The doc from lirc (https://www.lirc.org/html/audio.html) says that the log file should list device found but I dont get any entries here either. It does however give an error on startup - lircd-0.10.0[10875]: Error: No matching /dev/lirc device found for "auto"  (auto was one of my device attempts)

From this it seems (to me, remember limited linux here) that the audio device is somehow not available to the system & lirc. Since snakeoil is able to 'see' it, could it be possibly taking exclusive control of it ? 

By default, users are not part of the audio group, that's why when you run commands like "aplay -l" etc, you get nothing. But if you run something like "sudo aplay -l", then it will show up.

Likewise you may need to add your user to both audio and lirc (or whatever that group is doing)... To simplify things, you can run everything as the root user, it will have access to both your IR Blaster and audio device...