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JpsUsbRaw is a tool for manipulating the settings file on UEI universal remotes that have a USB interface without using the operating system's implementations of USB Mass Storage or the FAT file system.

Some universal remote controls manufactured by UEI have a USB port for configuration, notably the OARUSB04G in the US and the URC-6440 in the EU. These remotes expose a FAT-formatted drive to the computer via USB Mass Storage which contains a file called settings.bin. The settings file is intended to be uploaded to SimpleSet, a web application for editing the remote's settings. It can also be manipulated by RMIR, a much more powerful editing application created by the community at the JP1 Remotes Forum.

Unfortunately these devices don't implement the USB Mass Storage and FAT standards entirely correctly. While they work just fine on Windows, certain write operations fail under Linux and OSX. This project interacts with the remote directly using libusb and provides implementations of USB Mass Storage and the FAT file system tailored to the behavior of UEI devices. It can therefore be used to read or write the settings.bin file even on platforms whose native implementations aren't compatible.

Usage

Unfortunately the project isn't quite done enough to be usable yet.

Linux

Fortunately libusb already works just fine on Linux, and we can take control of USB devices away from the platform drivers just by asking. If you want to be able to write to your remote without being root (strongly recommended), you need to make sure that your user has write access to the device. First make sure your user is a member of the dialout group, then install the following snippet as /etc/udev/rules.d/80-jps-usb-raw.rules. That file provides rules for the device manager that ask it to make UEI remote devices available to the dialout group. If your remote is alreay plugged in, you'll need to unplug it and plug it back in for the new rules to take effect.

# /etc/udev/rules.d/80-jps-usb-raw.rules
# Allow 'dialout' group access to UEI universal remotes with USB interfaces.
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTR{idVendor}=="06e7", ATTR{idProduct}=="8020", MODE="0660", GROUP="dialout"

Mac OS X

The documentation for libusb says it works on OS X, but that the device must not be claimed by a platform driver, and since the UEI remotes are Mass Storage devices they will be. There's supposedly a workaround similar to the one for Windows involving registering a driver for the device which does nothing. Unfortunately I don't have a Mac to test with, so OS X support will depend on someone else to come up with instructions or patches. If you're interested see Contributing, below.

Windows

Running libusb-based applications (including this one) on Windows requires that you first install a device driver. You shouldn't need to use JpsUsbRaw on Windows, though, as the UEI remotes work just fine with Windows' native USB Mass Storage and FAT implementations. Just copy your settings.bin file to the drive that shows up when you plug in your remote with the Windows file explorer.

Contributing

This is a Maven project, so you can compile everything and build the JARs with mvn package. Two JARs are produced. One is the main artifact and contains only the files from this project. The other has the suffix -shaded and contains the application and all its dependencies.

If you wish to contribute, please submit a pull request or open an issue on GitHub. If you can't do either of those, you can send reports and patches by email to [email protected]. All code contributions must agree to the CC0 public domain declaration and license in COPYING.txt.

Reference Documentation

Copying

Written in 2016 by Sam Hanes [email protected]

To the extent possible under law, the author(s) have dedicated all copyright and related and neighboring rights to this software to the public domain worldwide. This software is distributed without any warranty.

You should have received a copy of the CC0 Public Domain Dedication along with this software. If not, see http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/.