Does the LIRC integration work with Hass?

Installation Home Assistant OS
1

I’m trying to get LIRC to send my codes to an IR LED I built. I see HA has a LIRC integration but the setup has me doing an apt-get to install the integration.

I’m new to Hass and I’ve only customized it with add-ons. I haven’t seen the need to apt-get anything yet, so I’m not sure if this is meant for installs without Hass or if it’ll still work with Hass.

Are these integration instructions compatible with Hass or do I have to find a LIRC add-on?

Also, would I do the apt-get within SSH using the SSH add-on?

I created a test Pi, tried the apt-get command, and it didn’t work. Is there any way to get LIRC to work on Hass?

My setup
Raspberry Pi 3b+
HassOS 3.8
Home Assistant 0.104.3

I’m able to get LIRC to work directly with Raspbian Buster, so my LED and remote control conf files are good. I just need it to work on the Pi that I have Hass installed.

Thanks for your help and advice!

2

I’m facing the same problem. About to give up. I think they’d need to preinstall the lirc packages in HassOS to get lirc to work.

3

I’m working on a similar project and have had some success. I found this post here Automating "unsmart" IR devices which describes how to set up lirc_web to make it accesable via a REST api call. This didn’t work for me because lirc_web is kinda old and didn’t work on raspbian buster.

What worked for me was installing node-red on the lirc device, and then downloading and setting up the lirc-module for node-red (https://flows.nodered.org/node/node-red-contrib-lirc), and makIng it listen to my mqtt server. I’ve set up topics like lirc/tv and lirc/receiver for each remote and set up each remote in node red, then you just send the command to the topic/remote you want. You don’t need to send the full lirc cli command, node-red does most the work, so when the message KEY_POWER goes to topic lirc/tv, it turns the tv on and off.

I’ve downloaded the Generic Remote Control Card on the HACS community store and used that to publish the mqtt messages. I have just finished testing my setup out on a Pi4 but will be moving it over to a Pi ZeroW soon. When I do I’ll do a step by step guide on how to set everything up.

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4

I’ve gone ahead and posted my steps for the Node-RED set up at LIRC Output Using Node-Red/MQTT

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