Recording an IR signal and play it again on Raspberry Pi bullseye

Question

I have a Teco aircon with an ifrared remote. I connected an IF receiver and an IF transmitter to my Pi and they are working fine. EC systems are different to TVs, in that they send a rather long sequence of information each time you press a button. irrecord fails miserably trying to get what button you pressed. All it gets is the gap (50000) and the frequency (38000).

I got strong inspiration from this post on doing this. So...

First, I record what's being sent:

ir-ctl -rTEMPERATURE.txt --mode2 -r --device=/dev/lirc1 -1

This is a specific mode, with a specific temperature. The file is saved and looks like this:

pulse 3117
space 1536
pulse 487
space 1093
pulse 487
space 1095
(...227 lines...)
space 1061
pulse 516
space 300
pulse 517

I then try and resent the exact same thing to my aircon:

ir-ctl -d /dev/lirc0 -sTEMPERATURE.txt -g 50000 --carrier 38000

But nothing happens. The aircon doesn't seem to respond.

(Note that I know the transmitter is working, because I tried to run the sending and the receiving at the same time, and the receiver acknowledged receiving data.)

I tried different "carrier" options, and none of them worked.

So, questions:

0. Why isn't the aircon getting the message?

1. How do I translate "TEMPERATURE.txt" in actual data (that is, bytes)

2. If I manage to do (1), how do I then send that rather than a bunch of pulses?

Am I doing this fundamentally wrong?

I spent my whole week end on this... and am frankly at my wits' end. I will deeply appreciate any hints.

Answer 1

Air conditioner codes tend to be very long. They are nothing like the codes used by TV and similar remotes.

I know some people have had success reading/writing such codes with pigpio but it was by no means a simple process. pigpio is preinstalled in some versions of RasPiOS.

You need to look at the codes being used in detail.

I suggest you have a look at IR Record and Playback but it is unlikely to work with an air conditioner code.

Use piscope to capture and analyse the codes.