Learning IR Commands for Custom Devices

We have Sony Bravia TVs that do not respond to the provided IR codes (“All Sony TVs”), so I tried using an iTach device with Roomie to go through the learning procedure. It was going well, but about halfway through Roomie loops back around to the first code. In other words, it learns about the first 25 but not the second 25 codes (once it gets to something like code 26 the learning process jumps back to code 1).

Unfortunately some of the more important commands (like volume and mute) cannot be learned because the learning process never reaches those commands. I discovered that I can manually enter codes named “VOLUME UP” and “VOLUME DOWN” and when Roomie learns those the volume control works, but I don’t know the name for mute (“MUTE” does not work) or the other commands that are never reached.

Is there a bug in Roomie, or is there a way to program the missing commands that I have just not discovered?

Thank you!

First, we would strongly suggest reviewing step 5 in the IR Diagnosis FAQ:

roomieremote.com/faq/#diagnoseIR

That specifically discusses Sony TVs as the classic case needing a higher retransmit count. It’s extremely likely just setting that to 2-4 will resolve the issue.

While we’d love to figure out how you looped around learning codes, it’s probably simpler just to forget it and use the built-in codes that work with all models of Sony TVs.

Thanks for the reply – I’ll try the default Sony template with the higher retransmit count and see if it works. However it’s interesting that the codes that have been successfully learned (before the codes loop around) do work with the transmit count set to one. If the Sony TVs require a higher transmit count then I would think the learned codes would not work either without increasing the transmit count.

I’ll try the template again, though, and let you know what happens. Thanks.

That works because you’re effectively “learning” a doubled code. If you always learn doubled codes, you end up with little annoyances like volume levels going up by 2 instead of 1 when you hit volume up. That’s one reason the codes by default are the minimum length. So it’s much better to use the built-in codes whenever possible as we’ve already accounted for things like that.

I tried setting the transmit count to two for the default Sony remote as you suggested and it worked! Thanks for the help and for the explanation!