Fluorescent lights and MCEUSB remote control receiver- bad news!

[indulis]

Was cursing how slow the UI was on LinuxMCE (grumble... what did they do to the YouTube video to make it look good... speed it up?).

Then I noticed that the red "receiving IR" LED was on all the time on the MCE USB receiver.

Moved it into a dark spot away from light from the fluorescents and everything suddenly sped up.  I am talking response times going from 10 seconds from button push on the remote until the UI registered it, down to instant.

I am thinking that the receiver was getting a lot of noise and causing a huge amount of traffic into the USB port.

Also, have had plasma TVs do the same sort of interference (though it did not cause the same slowdown as it was to an IR repeater unit).

[Crumble]

i'm almost certain i saw a sensitivity option for the usbuirt.  Could be wrong, thought i'd say it anyway.


Crumble

[colinjones]

Moral of the story, get rid of your fluorescent lighting, its tacky anyway

[indulis]

Well here in Oz the govt has mandated tacky.  No more "baby toasters" (otherwise known as incandescents) in a couple of years.

The fluoros are not too bad they are the warm light ones. Almost not horrible :-)  Pet hate of mine too in the past, but the warm phosphor ones I can tolerate.

My IR receiver is the MS MCE one.  Now I know about the problem I can hide the receiver well away from light and it'll be OK.  But finding it!!!!

Not as bad as when I had Mythtv working over Ethernet over power adapters.  In the evenings the picture would always break up when watching in the bedroom.  Turns out it was some bad (cheap) compact fluorescent bulbs generating noise on the AC line. This was causing the Ethernet bandwidth to drop due to the noise. I think the new ones are much better.  That problem had me tearing my hair out too!