Brian's Brain

A lot of my recent blog coverage has, I realize, focused on relatively complex and expensive gadgets....Zune, the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 (along with its HD DVD add-on), LCD and plasma TVs, etc. But rest assured, dear engineering readers, that plenty of compelling business opportunities also exist for more modest widgets. Although their prices might be lower, their profits (and their production volumes) may be just as healthy (if not more robust).

Here's one example. As previously mentioned, my wife and I are currently enjoying free DirecTV service, the result of a class action lawsuit brought against the company for over-aggressive faxing of promotional materials. DirecTV's installers provided us with a D11-500 satellite receiver, which includes a USB input. Our ReplayTV 4040 (also known as the 4504) has a serial port output intended for controlling an external device's channel-changing function.

At this point, you might be entertaining similar thoughts to the ones I had; connect the D11-500's video output to the 4040's video input (RF, composite video and S-Video are all possibilities), tether the 4040's COM port to the 4040's USB port via a RS-232-to-USB adapter (say that 10 times fast!), and voila; time-shift DirecTV. Nice idea, but a non-starter. The APG (Advanced Program Guide) firmware update to DirecTV receivers rendered them incompatible with conventional serial port commands (a convenient excuse, my cynical mind immediately leaps to thinking, for DirecTV to migrate customers to a more expensive and profitable PVR-inclusive satellite box), and my older ReplayTV model cannot be firmware-upgraded to support APG.

Don't worry, I didn't buy a replacement DirecTV or ReplayTV unit; there's another, cheaper way of solving this problem, without resorting to unreliable IR control. Paterson Technology has developed a $40 dongle, the TV Translator, which handles serial-to-APG command conversion. It's even firmware-upgradeable, although you need to USB-tether it to a PC to accomplish this; it'd be slick if there was some way to handle TV Translator updates directly through the already-Internet-connected ReplayTV. If you're curious to see how TV Translator works, the company provides a pretty detailed explanation on its website, including schematics, believe it or not (but not the 'secret sauce' i.e. the PIC microcontroller code)!

By the way, Paterson Technology's founder is Tim Paterson. That name might sound familiar to those of you who know something about Microsoft's history....