One was to a cash bounty publicly offered by Banshee developer Aaron Bockover.

Dibowitz’s initial post drew tremendous traffic, and the feedback included several email messages directing him toward others who had tackled the same task. Out of frustration, he blogged about the experience, a decision that, through a chain of connections, eventually enabled him to link up with someone who could provide answers. I replied and explained I wasn’t asking for Linux support, I was doing the Linux support *for* them … but they said they couldn’t release the information I wanted.” I sent another ticket, and got a “we don’t support Linux” response. He spent about a month trying to get someone from the Harmony team to contact me, then gave up. “My first ticket to support miraculously got forwarded to a developer, but not on the Harmony team. Initial progress was slow, so he wrote to Logitech for help. He started with USB dumps captured on a Windows machine. Writing a Linux driver for the remote fit both needs perfectly. Already familiar enough with the kernel USB subsystem to make contributions, he had been on the lookout for a more ambitious hacking project for a while. Harmony on Linux: Pass the wordĭibowitz bought a Harmony 880 remote last year after upgrading his home theater system, but eventually got annoyed at having to switch over to his Mac every time he needed to adjust the remote’s configuration. All of these advanced features are configured through a GUI application that accesses Logitech’s remote database of home theater devices and uploads your settings to the remote over a USB cable. Remotes from the Harmony line feature fully programmable buttons, an infrared (IR) receiver that can learn commands from other remotes, LCD screens (some in color) with reprogrammable labels, and user-defined macros with which you can script multiple-command sequences involving multiple devices.

That wasn’t enough for Phil Dibowitz, though - he set out to build his own Linux support. Logitech’s Harmony series of programmable universal remote controls ship with Windows and Mac OS X configuration programs.

Harmony remote programming