Author: admin

Posted on

Changhong Service Menu

I have an old dumb Changhong TV and wanted to set it up to turn on and off automatically when my Roku is turned on. I always have a few smart sockets lying around but the TV defaults to powered off when power is applied.

I found a note somewhere that the service menu can be accessed by pressing the source button on the remote and entering the code 3138. That worked so I went digging through the menus.

Under System Setting>Power ON Mode there were options for On, Off, and Memory. I went with Memory for now but might change it to On later.

While I was in the System Setting page I also noticed an option called Logo Select. I tried setting to off hoping it would get rid of the Creating Easy Life logo on power up.

Both options worked as expected. If I plug it in now, it turns on (assuming it was on when I unplugged it) and it boots up without a splash screen.

BTW, there’s a bunch of interesting stuff in the service menu – even the ability to flip the screen. They seem to have anticipated folks using these as kiosk displays.

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Install Flirc software on Fedora (and other RPM based distros?)

The Flirc Media Center Companion is a neat little USB device that lets you use any IR remote control with your Raspberry Pi or Android stick. The software you need to set it up is available for Linux but they only maintain the Debian package. There’s an old RPM available but I had problems installing it.

Here’s what I did to create a working (and current) RPM version:

  1. Download the latest DEB file that matches your architecture here: http://apt.flirc.tv/arch. For example, for 64 bit at this time that’s http://apt.flirc.tv/arch/x86_64/binary/flirc_1.3.6-1_amd64.deb.
  2. Convert it to an RPM with alien: sudo alien -r flirc_1.3.6-1_amd64.deb
  3. Remove the unnecessary and conflicting entries: rpmrebuild -p –change-spec-files=”grep -i flirc” flirc-1.3.6-2.x86_64.rpm

That command will create a new RPM that should install cleanly and it all seems to work fine for me. I’m on Fedora 21 64-bit.