Possible issue with IR Blaster

[myrealemai...@gmail.com]

In trying to test whether the external receiver on my IR blaster is working, I ran into something that I has happened to me several times before when I was doing the same type of operation - editing existing rules and then saving them back to the IR Blaster.. I am not sure what is going on, however, I think that I have at least a partial set of steps to recreate the issue. I am using the current version of System Commander - v1.4.1025 and the IR Blaster firmware is 1.7.5b. According to System Commander, the firmware in my LAN Bridge is also up-to-date.

Steps to recreate:

1. Connect to an IR Blaster with a set of IR Rules that had been previously stored.
2. Edit one of the rules. I changed the IR Receiver in the rule from "Any" to "External".
3. Save the rules to the device.
4. Reload the rules from the device.
5. At this point, the details become a bit fuzzy. The IR rules screen does not confirm a reload other than to display rules, so I was not sure that they had been reloaded.
   

I then tried the rule, however, it did not work - perhaps indicating that the external receiver was not functioning.

I then tried to reload the rules from a backup file. I loaded the file into System Commander, and then tried "Save to Device" again. I then tried "Reload from Device" after the save finished, and this time, the rules and action boxes cleared completely. I tried resetting the IR Blaster with both the hard switch and sending reset commands from System Commander. I also tried resetting the LAN Bridge from System commander.

After fussing with this for a while from different computers thinking it was perhaps an issue with System Commander and Windows 8.1 (there was no traffic on my LAN other than the traffic between the System Commander and the LAN Bridge/IR Blaster), the LAN Bridge then started acting funny - i.e., slot configuration disappeared, rules disappeared, so I tried connecting and disconnecting from System Commander. Then the IR Blaster disappeared from the CF device list, and the configuration pages of the LAN Bridge started working properly again.

Finally, I disconnected the power from the LAN Bridge/IR Blaster, and the IR Blaster reappeared in the list of CF devices. I recreated the IR rules by hand, and they started functioning again.

The other times I had something like this happen was when I followed the first four steps above and then reloaded from a backup file. I also remember that what I had to do to get the IR rules working again was to recreate them by hand.

I am not sure if this is an issue or not, but it seems that there is a set of similar steps that will cause the IR Blaster rule set to stop functioning or clear completely, and then fail to save them to the device requiring either a reset or cycling the power to get the IR rules working again.

My apologies the set of steps is not exact. I realize that something like this might be hard to track down.